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View of an offshore oil and gas production platform in the Niger delta, Nigeria. A federal grand jury has indicted a former executive of a subsidiary of energy services firm Willbros Group Inc. on charges of conspiring to bribe Nigerian officials, the US Department of Justice said Monday.
View of an offshore oil and gas production platform in the Niger delta, Nigeria. A federal grand jury has indicted a former executive of a subsidiary of energy services firm Willbros Group Inc. on charges of conspiring to bribe Nigerian officials, the US Department of Justice said Monday.
A federal grand jury has indicted a former executive of a subsidiary of energy services firm Willbros Group Inc. on charges of conspiring to bribe Nigerian officials, the US Department of Justice said Monday.
Jason Steph, 37, is charged with conspiring to make over six million dollars in bribe payments to Nigerian officials to obtain and retain gas pipeline construction business from a joint venture majority-owned and controlled by the Nigerian state oil company.
The four-count indictment unsealed in a federal court in Houston, Texas, accuses Steph, a US citizen residing in Kazakhstan, of violations of the federal Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.
Steph was also charged with money laundering based upon the international transfer of some of the alleged bribe money, the Justice Department said.
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Willbros is a Houston-based, publicly-traded company that provides construction, engineering and other services in the oil and gas industry.
Steph worked at Willbros International Inc., a subsidiary that conducts the group's international operations. The indictment alleges a conspiracy from late 2003 through March 2005 when Steph was general manager at Willbros International's on-shore operations in Nigeria.
It alleges a conspiracy that included Steph, two individuals acting in Nigeria as purported consultants to Willbros and and others, to make millions of dollars in corrupt payments to help win a major gas pipeline engineering, procurement and construction project, the Justice Department said.
Willbros and an unnamed German consortium partner submitted bids for the project, known as the Eastern Gas Gathering System (EGGS), for approximately 387 million dollars.
In exchange for the award of the project, the conspirators allegedly paid, promised to pay, and authorized payments to officials of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corp., its joint-venture investment unit, a senior official in the executive branch of the Nigerian federal government, and others, the US Justice Department said.
Most of the payments were allegedly laundered through consultants, who typically received three percent of Willbros' contract revenue by wire transfer from Houston to a foreign bank, and transferred some or all of the funds to Nigerian officials, it said.