Legal News

With Halliburton Exec. Guilty Plea, Hot Practice Area Back in the News

By Ashby Jones

For months, we’ve been hearing from lawyers about the latest, greatest practice area: “FCPA work,” or defense work for companies and individuals threatened by prosecutions under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. This morning, we’re reminded of why folks are willing to shell out big bucks for serious FCPA lawyering: the stakes are high. Fired former Halliburton executive Albert J. “Jack” Stanley pleaded guilty to orchestrating more than $180 million in bribes to senior Nigerian government officials. The bribes were used to win a contract to build a liquefied-natural-gas plant in Nigeria. Here are the WSJ, NYT and AP stories.

Under a plea agreement entered Wednesday in a Houston federal court, Stanley faces seven years in prison and a $10.8 million restitution payment. His lawyer, Lee Kaplan, said, “We’re hopeful the government finds his cooperation merits” a reduction in his prison sentence.

According to the plea, government prosecutors said bribes began in 1995, while Stanley worked for M.W. Kellogg, then part of a company called Dresser Industries. Halliburton acquired Dresser in 1998 and merged M.W. Kellogg into an engineering and construction unit of Halliburton called Kellogg Brown & Root, or KBR.

Several of the bribes Stanley has said were paid occurred after that acquisition, during the time when Vice President Dick Cheney led Halliburton, and they continued after Cheney left. Though there was no evidence Cheney knew of the bribes, he promoted Stanley to run KBR in 1998. Stanley’s guilty plea said the bribes continued until 2004, the year Halliburton fired him. Cheney’s tenure as Halliburton chief executive ended in 2000.

Halliburton did not comment on the guilty plea, but it has said in financial filings that it has produced documents to investigators and made employees available for interviews. A spokeswoman for KBR, which Halliburton spun off last year, said it hadn’t reviewed the plea and couldn’t comment, but that the company “does not in any way condone or tolerate illegal or unethical behavior.”

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on September 04, 2008 (boomark / email).