Ex-Haiti official convicted in U.S. for
corruption - Yahoo! News
Reuters – Tue, Mar 13, 2012
MIAMI (Reuters) - A
former senior telecommunications official in Haiti has been
convicted in federal court in Miami for accepting $500,000 in
bribes from two U.S.
companies that secured lucrative long-distance phone contracts in the
impoverished Caribbean nation, authorities
said on Tuesday.
A jury unanimously found Jean
Rene Duperval guilty on Monday after a
week-long trial in a case based on 2001-2005 dealings that involve several
former officials who served under former Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.
Duperval, a 45-year-old resident of Miramar, Florida,
faces up to 20 years imprisonment when he appears for sentencing on May 21 in
the U.S. District Court for southern
Florida. An appeal is planned, his lawyers office
said.
Duperval, a former director of international relations
at Haiti Teleco,
Haiti's
state-run telecommunications company, was prosecuted as part of a broader
investigation under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which prohibits
U.S.-linked firms from bribing foreign officials.
"Mr. Duperval was convicted
by a Miami jury
of laundering $500,000 paid to him as part of an elaborate bribery
scheme," Assistant U.S. Attorney General Lanny Breuer of the Justice Department's Criminal Division said
in a statement.
"Duperval doled out business
in exchange for bribes and then used South Florida shell companies to conceal
his crimes," said Breuer.
Duperval was the eighth defendant involved in the
corruption scheme to be convicted so far, prosecutors said.
Last year, the former president of Florida-based Terra Telecommunications Corp was sentenced to
15 years in prison for his involvement in a scheme to pay hundreds of thousands
of dollars in bribes to officials in Haiti.
Prosecutors said that from November 2001 through March 2005
the company paid more than $890,000 to shell companies to be used as kickbacks
to Haitian government officials.
Terra sought to obtain business advantages through the
bribes, including preferred telecoms rates, prosecutors said.
U.S. officials have also charged former company executives
at a second company, Cinergy Telecommunications Inc.
Haiti Teleco, which was privatized
in 2010 and is now controlled by a Vietnamese military-run company Viettel, was the sole provider of land line telephone
service in Haiti.
Terra held contracts with Teleco that allowed the
company's customers to place calls to Haiti.
Patrick Joseph, the former
director general of Haiti Teleco, pleaded guilty to
bribery charges last month in U.S.
District Court in Miami.
Court documents said Joseph had agreed to cooperate with U.S.
authorities investigating Terra and Cinergy.
In a high-profile case, still under investigation in Haiti, Joseph's father Venel
Joseph, who served as Haiti's
central bank chief under Aristide, was shot and killed in the Haitian capital
last week.
(Reporting By Tom Brown; Editing by Eric Walsh) http://news.yahoo.com/ex-haiti-official-convicted-u-corruption-173855320.html
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Corruption 'will cost Germany €250 billion' - The Local
March 16, 2012 http://www.thelocal.de/money/20120316-41373.html
Corruption will blow a quarter-trillion-euro hole in Germany's
economy in 2012, despite the country being near the top of Transparency
International's anti-corruption index, an alarming new study has estimated.
The estimate, based on a study by Friedrich
Schneider, economics professor at the Johannes
Kepler University in Linz, Austria,
topped the professor's own estimate of seven years ago, when corruption reached
a low-point of €220 billion.
Economists agree that bribery and favours among
public officials and private businessmen are generally dependent on the
economic situation – the worse the economy, the more open people in authority
are to a brown envelope under the table.
But according to a report in Die Welt newspaper, the study concludes
that there are other factors at play, including what Schneider calls
"increasing bad habits."
The professor thinks there are only two effective ways to prevent corruption –
stricter rules and more severe punishments, or better pay. He added that the
two needn't be mutually exclusive.
The researcher's conclusions are based on data from the corruption index kept
by Transparency International since 1995. Germany ranks 14 in the chart of
least corrupt countries.
Economists believe corruption damages the economy because bribery often leads
to the best and cheapest offer losing a deal, which leads to smaller
investments for these investment projects. This ultimately damages growth.