Thursday, July 26, 2007

San Antonio Army Major at Center of Biggest-Ever Alleged DOD Bribery Scandal

I don't pay as much attention to corporate crime on this blog as I probably should, but this caught my eye: An Army major and his wife stationed at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio allegedly took $9.6 million and were scheduled to receive $5.4 million more from a total of eight different defense contractors, some of them US-based, said NPR, citing an indictment handed down this week by a federal grand jury in San Antonio. Read more in the SA Express News or listen to the NPR story here. The couple are at the center of what an investigator said, if true, would be the biggest bribery scandal in the history of the US Department of Defense.

Meanwhile, an Army reserve major from Georgetown pled guilty this week to taking bribes related to Iraq procurement. It makes you begin to wonder exactly how deep this rabbit hole goes?

In both these cases they're prosecuting the officer but don't publicly name the companies in court documents. My question: Why aren't we seeing contractors themselves prosecuted, or the folks who OFFERED the bribes? I wonder if that's because the corporate guys become informants so the big fish get off while the little fish get eaten?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Were I not Jewish I might think this was the beginning of the Rapture! Is our whole world going nuts, or even more critical, amoral? Our founding brothers' concept of checks and balances isn't the way this systems uses it.