MR Albert Jack Stanley, former chief executive officer (CEO) of KBR Inc has been sentenced to 30 months in prison for his role in a massive, decade-long scheme to bribe Nigerian government officials to win $6 billion in contracts for a liquefied natural gas facility. He was jailed last Thursday.
Stanley, 69, pleaded guilty in September 2008 in a scheme to route $182 million in bribes to Nigerian government officials. The ex-KBR CEO, who served at one point under former United States (US) Vice President Dick Cheney at Halliburton, has been awaiting sentencing after this date was reset 16 times.
"The misconduct here was serious, ongoing and deeply hurtful," said Judge Keith Ellison U.S. District, before handing down Stanley's sentence, which also includes three years of probation.
Earlier, last Thursday, Ellison gave a former KBR consultant a 21-month prison sentence for acting as a middle-man to channel bribes to Nigerian officials on behalf of KBR and three other members of a Portugal-based consortium called TSKJ.
Mr .Jeffrey Tesler, 63, a consultant and lawyer, pleaded guilty almost a year ago to one count of conspiracy to violate and one count of violating the bribery law known as the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA).  
Despite fighting extradition from Britain, Tesler was sent to the United States in March 2011, where he entered a guilty plea. He faced up to five years in prison on each count and had already agreed to forfeit almost $150 million as part of his plea agreement.
Tesler, a dual U.K. and Israeli citizen, had faced as long as 10 years in prison and Chodan, who is British, as long as five years under their plea deals. Both men were extradited from the U.K. to face charges in the U.S.
On Wednesday, Judge Ellison sentenced another Briton, Wojciech Chodan, to probation for taking part in the bribery scheme when he worked at a unit of KBR. He had cooperated with the investigation.
Both Stanley and Tesler expressed remorse for their actions. Stanley said his judgement had been clouded by "ego, ambition and alcohol" and said he cooperated with the Justice Department since 2004.
Stanley's lawyer, Larry Veselka, called him "the most effective and cooperating witness in U.S. history" in helping to pursue FCPA violators. He  asked that his client be sentenced to house arrest instead of prison, saying Stanley's cooperation resulted in eight felony guilty pleas, four deferred-prosecution agreements and fines of $1.7 billion.
US government officials said Stanley mislead federal investigators for four years before he fully revealed the details of the case. However, the U.S. government agreed to cut Stanley's proposed sentence in half - to 42 months from 84 months - based on his cooperation.
 "He knew he was in a lot of trouble before he started cooperating, right?" Ellison asked."Mr. Stanley wasn't a whistle-blower by any stretch," said government prosecutor Patrick Stokes. "Mr. Stanley was the leader of a gigantic fraud."
KBR was previously a unit of oil services firm Halliburton but was spun off in 2007 and in 2009 agreed to pay $579 million to settle bribery allegations.