Former US Army Major sentenced in corruption case

A former US Army major has been sentenced to twelve years in prison for a scheme involving money laundering and bribery for Iraq reconstruction contracts.

Eddie Pressley , along with his wife, was convicted of 22 counts of fraud, bribery, conspiracy and money laundering back in March – the couple had accepted $2.9 million in bribes between 2004 and 2006.

Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer said that Pressley “participated in a wide-ranging scheme to steer U.S. Army contracts to particular providers in exchange for personal, illegal profit”. The case resulted from an investigation into contracts from Camp Arifjan, a US base in Kuwait.

The illicit contracts did not generally involve high-end military equipment but everyday items such as bottled water and gravel, which were huge business during the height of the US involvement in Iraq.

The FBI, which led the investigation, insists that the wrongdoing “is in no way representative of the vast majority of public officials and government contractors who work hard to serve our military.” However, the conviction of 15 other people also involved in the scheme suggests that it was a wide-ranging conspiracy.

Many reports have strongly criticised waste and corruption in government contracting related to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, and its Afghanistan-focused counterpart, have investigated dozens of cases in which contracts were given without proper oversight. In most cases the issue was simply one of negligence, but the huge amounts of money involved also gave easy pickings for those such as Pressley who actively engaged in corrupt practices.

With the war in Iraq now over and the final accounting efforts underway, more investigations into bad contracting will probably begin to get results.

Sources: Wall Street Journal, UPI