SAO PAULO, May 27 — A Brazilian judge sentenced a former international director at state-run oil firm Petroleo Brasileiro SA to five years in prison for money laundering yesterday, the second company executive convicted in an ongoing corruption probe.
Federal Judge Sergio Moro said there was ample evidence that the former director, Nestor Cervero, set up a front company to launder money. He also used illicit money to buy a luxury apartment in Rio de Janeiro, the judge said.
Cervero was fired from Petrobras, as the company is known, in 2014 and arrested in January as he stepped off a plane from Europe. He is also suspected of receiving bribes in exchange for awarding drilling ship contracts.
Russia’s federal space industry has been beset by corruption, “moral decay” and billions of dollars worth of financial violations, according to government officials.
An investigation by Russia’s public spending watchdog agency revealed that in 2014 alone 92 billion rubles ($1.8bn, £1.2bn) was misused by the Roscosmos space agency.
“At first I could not believe my inspectors,” Tatyana Golikova, head of the watchdog agency, said on Friday (22 May).
Russia’s Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin has said that the Roscosmos agency will be abolished and replaced by a state corporation in the second half of 2015.
Rogozin blamed the financial mismanagement of the Roscosmos agency for a string of spacecraft accidents since 2010.
Former Gov. Don Siegelman will be staying in prison on public corruption charges. And he won’t be seeing his sentence reduced either.
That is what a federal appeals court in Atlanta ruled Wednesday sinking Siegelman’s hopes for a new trial or at least some time shaved off the remaining two years of his original six and a half year sentence.
When I heard the news my first reaction was a yawn. I think I’m like a lot of you. I was done with the Siegelman thing a long time ago. It’s still hard for me to get my head around the fact that this case is now into its second decade.
I remember the June 2006 day when a Montgomery federal jury found Siegelman guilty of bribery, conspiracy and fraud charges. Almost a year later to the date I was sitting in that same Montgomery courtroom as Judge Mark Fuller handed down the sentence – 88 months – whispered into my cell phone to my editor back in Birmingham who was having trouble hearing me. I whispered out of concern that any minute a federal marshal was going to come over and yank me up for using the phone.
A top police chief has slammed opaque accounting practises of some of Britain’s biggest business, accusing them of concealing the true extent of fraud in the UK in order to protect their reputation and bolster share prices.
Metropolitan police commissioner Sir Bernard Hohan-Howe told envoys from FTSE 100 companies and other firms that by failing to report financial crimes, they were leaving police officers “in the dark about the state of the threat and the methods of attack”.
They were Albany’s most powerful men: the governor, the Senate leader and the Assembly speaker. Together, they negotiated billion-dollar budgets and decided which bills passed and which ones didn’t.
Now two face federal corruption charges, and the third — Gov. Andrew Cuomo — appears eager to focus on other issues even as he faces questions about his ties to a major real estate firm at the center of the newest scandal to rock the state Capitol.
In recent days he talked about campus sexual assault with U.S. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi. He traveled to Buffalo with Cardinal Timothy Dolan to tout an education tax credit. He held briefings at the scene of a nuclear plant transformer fire.
The political crisis in Albany got less attention.
“If the charges are correct, it’s deeply disturbing,” is what Cuomo said following the arrest of Senate Leader Dean Skelos on charges that he extorted payments for his son from the developer and another business. The Long Island Republican resigned his leadership post Monday.
ALBANY, N.Y. (AP) — Dean Skelos stepped down as leader of the New York Senate on Monday in the wake of federal corruption charges and was quickly replaced by another Long Island Republican, Sen. John Flanagan.
Skelos, who is keeping his legislative seat, is the sixth legislative leader to face criminal charges or scandal in Albany since 2008. Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, a Democrat, stepped down from his leadership position in January.
JOHNSTOWN, Colo. – A former Johnstown councilman has been arrested and charged with 28 felony counts, including theft, fraud and forgery under the Colorado Organized Crime Control Act.
Clair Hull served as a Johnstown Town Councilman from 2006 to 2011, and his name is on the plaque at the new Town Hall building.
Before his arrest, he was best known as the former Mormon bishop and businessman who organized the town’s BBQ Days.
ALBANY – New York’s pension system is paying out about $531,000 a year to 14 former state lawmakers and officials who have been convicted of a crime, state records show.
All told, the state’s $176.8 billion retirement fund has paid out roughly $4 million over the past 15 years to ex-legislators after their convictions, according to a Gannett Albany Bureau analysis of data provided by the state Comptroller’s Office.
ALBANY– On the heels of a string of political scandals a new poll shows Americans believe the Empire State is in the lead when it comes to corruption. The Monmouth University poll surveyed more than 1,000 randomly selected people of all parties across the country from March 30th through April 2nd. 12 percent of those surveyed said they believed New York was the most politically corrupt followed by California at 11 percent, Illinois at 9 percent, New Jersey and Texas both at 5 percent and Washington D.C. at 4 percent. “It’s disheartening to hear,” Hoosick Falls resident Neal Turner said. “We do pay an awful lot of taxes and we do have a certain, I have a certain, expectation and I’m a little disheartened.” “With the publicity surrounding what’s been going on at the Capitol with different politicians I think that’s the general perception,” Albany resident Susan Larivee said.
Wednesday just got pretty bizarre. US Capitol Police in Washington, DC have detained a man after he flew a personal gyrocopter through restricted airspace and landed it on the West Lawn of the Capitol building. The strange incident led authorities to close off nearby streets and briefly put the Capitol on lockdown. Reports indicate that police arrived immediately after the pilot, 61-year-old Doug Hughes, touched down. Hughes is a US postal worker from Ruskin, Florida, according to the Tampa Bay Times, and orchestrated the stunt as his own attempt to protest government corruption and urge lawmakers to advance campaign finance reform.
