As highlighted in this prior post, in January 2018 the DOJ announced that Mark Lambert (a former co-president of Transport Logistics International) was criminally charged with FCPA and related violations concerning the same underlying bribery scheme alleged in prior enforcement actions involving Vadim Mikerin (an alleged Russian “foreign official”) and Daren Condrey.
Earlier today, Lambert was convicted “for his role in a scheme to bribe an official at a subsidiary of Russia’s State Atomic Energy Corporation and on related fraud and conspiracy charges.”
As stated in the DOJ’s release:
“After a three-week trial, Mark Lambert … was found guilty of four counts of violating the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA), two counts of wire fraud, and one count of conspiracy to violate the FCPA and commit wire fraud.
According to the evidence presented at trial, Lambert participated in a scheme to bribe Vadim Mikerin, a Russian official at JSC Techsnabexport (TENEX), a subsidiary of Russia’s State Atomic Energy Corporation and the sole supplier and exporter of Russian Federation uranium and uranium enrichment services to nuclear power companies worldwide, in order to secure contracts with TENEX. The trial evidence demonstrated that, over the course of years, Lambert conspired with others at TLI to make the corrupt and fraudulent bribery and kickback payments to Mikerin through offshore bank accounts associated with shell companies, at Mikerin’s direction. In order to conceal the bribe payments, Lambert and his co-conspirators caused fake invoices to be prepared, purportedly from TENEX to TLI, that described services that were never provided, and then Lambert and others caused TLI to wire the corrupt payments for those purported services to shell companies in Latvia, Cyprus and Switzerland.
The trial evidence further showed that Lambert and other members of the conspiracy used code words like “lucky figures,” “LF,” “lucky numbers” and “cake” to describe the payments in emails to the Russian official at an alias, personal email account under the name “Marvin Jodel.” The evidence at trial also demonstrated that Lambert and his co-conspirators caused TLI to overbill TENEX by building the cost of the bribe payments into their invoices, and TENEX thus overpaid for TLI’s services in order to fund the bribes paid to Mikerin.”
Sentencing has been scheduled for March 9, 2020, before U.S. District Judge Theodore D. Chuang of the District of Maryland, who presided over the trial.
Lambert’s lawyer, William Sullivan (Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman LLP) provided FCPA Professor the following statement.
“We were very disappointed that after seven days of deliberations and a jury inquiry regarding the meaning of ‘reasonable doubt’ as well as two deadlock notes, the jury on the Friday afternoon before Thanksgiving week decided to render a partial and inconsistent verdict. We plan to file the appropriate post trial motions, and request appellate review if necessary.”
