KBR Bribery Case Grows

Acting on a request from U.S. prosecutors, police in London arrested a British man today on charges that he played a key role in a long-running bribery conspiracy at KBR Inc.

The man taken into custody, Jeffrey Tesler, 60, of London, and another man still being sought by authorities, Wojciech Chodan, 71, of Maidenhead, England, were indicted last month in Federal District Court in Houston, U.S. prosecutors said.

In the indictment, which was unsealed today, each man was charged with one count of conspiracy to violate the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and 10 counts of actually violating the act. If convicted, the men face as much as 55 years in prison and the forfeiture of $130 million.

According to the indictment, the men delivered perhaps $132 million in bribes to Nigerian officials to win $60 billion in construction contracts for a joint venture that included KBR and three other companies. The job was to build a liquefied natural gas plant.

At the time, in the mid- to late-1990s, Tessler was an agent of the joint venture and Chodan was a consultant advising a KBR subsidiary in Britain on how to win the contract in Nigeria, court records say.

According to the indictment, the joint venture hired Tesler to bribe Nigerian government officials, including top-level executive branch officials. At times, the indictment adds, KBR's former chief executive, Albert "Jack" Stanley, allegedly met with Nigerian government officials to discuss how to negotiate the bribes.

In the end, records say, Stanley and others allegedly negotiated bribe amounts with the office holders' representatives and agreed to hire Tesler and the other agent to pay the bribes.

When the bribery allegedly took place, KBR was known as Kellogg, Brown, and Root and was owned by Halliburton, which was run by former Vice President Dick Cheney from 1995 to 2000. Halliburton spun off KBR in 2007; the newly independent company pleaded guilty last month to its role in the Nigerian bribery case.

Stanley pleaded guilty in September 2008 to conspiring to violate the FCPA. A federal judge is scheduled to sentence him in August.

by Mark Stein