Former Leighton COO David Savage arrested in Sydney
David Savage was arrested leaving a Sydney hotel, becoming the second Leighton executive charged in relation to a 2003 Iraqi scandal.
Former Leighton Holdings executive David Savage has been arrested in Sydney on two charges of giving false or misleading information to authorities, becoming the second former Leighton executive to face charges over a 2003 corruption scandal.
Mr Savage was arrested leaving a Sydney hotel on Monday by officers from the Australian Federal Police, and appeared in a Sydney Local Court via video link charged with two counts of knowingly providing misleading information contrary to the Commonwealth Corporations Act of 2001.
He was arrested as he left hotel quarantine, after having arrived in Australia on December 27, according to the AFP.
The former Leighton chief operating officer has been charged after a long-running investigation into alleged bribery of Iraqi officials to win oil contracts.
He is the second former Leighton executive to face charges over the alleged bribery scandal, after former Leighton Offshore managing director Russell Waugh was charged with bribery offences in mid-November.
The investigation has been running since 2011, when the AFP says it received a report from Leighton — now renamed CIMIC — about alleged improper payments to win contracts worth $US1.5bn to rebuild Iraq’s oil pipeline infrastructure.
AFP investigators allege Leighton Offshore Pty Ltd funnelled bribes through entities associated with Monaco-based Unaoil to guarantee approvals for the Iraq oil export contracts, making “suspicious payments” of $US77.6m to Iraqi officials.
The key targets of the scheme were allegedly Iraqi Ministry of Oil officials and government officials within the South Oil Company of Iraq (SOC).
The AFP alleges that a group of former Leighton executives arranged payments to companies controlled by middlemen in order to obtain documents from Iraqi oil officials that were not available to the company’s competitors for the contracts, before using the same middlemen to engage in outright bribery in order to win the tenders.
The payments, according to the AFP, were disguised through mark-ups to existing service contracts with the middle men, with internal emails showing one contract with one company, which owned a geophysical survey site, showing $US24.5m worth of payments, of which $US8.3m was for “actual survey work” and the remaining $US16.2m was “for friend”.
The AFP investigation was run in parallel with similar investigations in the United Kingdom and the US.
AFP officers, working with Britain’s Serious Fraud Office and the US Department of Justice and the FBI, have seized more than two million documents related to the projects and obtained further evidence from another 10 countries.
Mr Waugh was charged over conduct that allegedly occurred from 2010 to 2012, including conspiring to bribe public officials associated with Iraq’s SOC and falsifying internal documents to hide the corrupt payments from Leighton’s auditors, banks and external investigators.
At the time, the AFP said it had also issued arrest warrants for two other men, believed to be Mr Savage and former Leighton Offshore boss Peter Cox.
Mr Savage was granted conditional bail after he appeared at Sydney’s Central Local Court on Monday to live at a property in the Canberra suburb of Griffith.
Under his proposed bail conditions, Mr Savage would be allowed to return to his home in Vernantes in western France, on March 23.
The matter is slated to return to court for a bail review on January 13.