UNITED NATIONS - The deal looked simple enough: U.S. military equipment suppliers bribed an African defense minister's salesmen to secure part of a $15 million gig to outfit a presidential guard.
But the salesmen were actually FBI agents. And the operation resulted in what U.S. authorities in January called their biggest foreign bribery sting to date, netting 16 indictments and 22 arrests of small-arms and military-equipment makers.
At the center of the U.S. case is Richard Bistrong, a former Florida executive who first surfaced in a series of cases of bribes and bid-rigging for multimillion-dollar U.N. peacekeeping contracts. The trail to Bistrong is laid out in U.N documents, e-mails and legal filings.
The story of Bistrong and the military equipment suppliers shows how vulnerable the United Nations is to corruption in the way billions of dollars a year that it oversees are spent. It also raises questions about how well that spending will be monitored in the future: The anti-corruption unit that first uncovered the bribery and bid-rigging was disbanded in 2008, after more than 300 investigations in three years.
"It is greatly disturbing that an organization plagued by corruption and mismanagement would disband its anti-corruption task force," said U.S. Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen of Florida, the ranking Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, who has proposed requiring the U.N. to do more to fight corruption or risk losing U.S. financial support.
Bistrong is a former executive for military equipment supplier Armor Holdings of Jacksonville, Fla. The Justice Department charged him in January with bribing foreign officials to outfit U.N. peacekeepers with $6 million in ballistic body armor and helmets. He was charged with cooking the books between 2001 and 2006 to obscure $4.4 million in payments, including $200,000 in kickbacks to one intermediary, to get the contracts.
Bistrong also was accused of paying a $15,000 bribe to a Dutch agent after winning a $2.4 million pepper-spray contract for the National Police Services Agency of the Netherlands, and of providing kickbacks to a Nigerian election official to get a contract for fingerprint ink pads for Nigeria's Independent National Election Commission.
Court papers say Bistrong had help from unindicted co-conspirators who are described but not named. However, they are named in documents by the U.N. Procurement Task Force, the former anti-corruption unit that set in motion the U.S. case.
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