JURIST - Paper Chase: Iraq reconstruction contractor arrested on bribery charges

[JURIST] The US Department of Justice (DOJ) [official website] announced Friday that US authorities have arrested [press release] Faheem Mousa Salam, a government contractor performing translation for Titan Corporation in Iraq, on bribery charges in Washington, DC. Salam, a naturalized US citizen, allegedly offered $60,000 to an Iraqi police official to help push a sale of 1,000 armored vests and a map printer for over $1 million in violation of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) [text]. Salam also made a similar offer to an undercover investigator working for the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR) [official website], an independent watchdog agency established to uncover bribery, extortion, fraud and other abuses in reconstruction efforts in Iraq. Salam could be imprisoned for as many as five years and fined at least $100,000 if he is convicted of the charges, which were filed by the DOJ in the US District Court for the District of Columbia [official website].

In February, the DOJ announced [press release] that Robert J. Stein [Wikipedia profile], a former US Defense Department contract official for the Coalition Provisional Authority [official website], pleaded guilty [JURIST report] to charges of conspiracy, bribery, money laundering, unlawful possession of machine guns, and being a felon in possession of a firearm after a SIGIR investigation that also implicated six other Americans, including Philip Bloom [JURIST report] and five US Army officers [JURIST report], in a plot conspiring to steal $2 million and to rig bids on $8.6 million in reconstruction contracts. AP has more.

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