A former executive at oil and gas consultancy Unaoil was on Thursday sentenced in London to three years and four months in jail for paying multi-million dollar bribes to clinch $1.7 billion worth of oil projects in post-occupation Iraq.
Basil Al Jarah, Unaoil’s 71-year-old former country manager for Iraq, admitted to paying $17 million in bribes to secure contracts such as oil pipelines and offshore mooring buoys in the Arabian Gulf, as the war-torn country tried to shore up a battered economy after the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003.
It is the third sentence handed down by a London judge after a five-year investigation by the Serious Fraud Office (SFO) and U.S. authorities into how the prominent Ahsani family, which ran Unaoil, secured energy contracts for Western blue-chip clients in the Middle East, Africa and Central Asia.
