A member of the US Army Corps of Engineers was arrested last Friday at Atlanta airport after a sting operation and is accused of accepting thousands of dollars in bribes from a Kuwaiti rental agent who wanted to provide expensive apartments for US military employees in Kuwait, the Justice Department said on Monday.
The Corps of Engineers employee is a 62-year-old civilian named Gheevarghese Pappen.
The charges are the latest in a growing number of corruption cases involving contracting, supplies, construction and transport services in support of the war in Iraq.
Pappen, a naturalized American who was returning to his home in Savannah, Georgia, when he was arrested, is accused of accepting about US$45,000 in bribes.
Unlike several previous cases involving accusations of bribes or inflated charges for services, there was no indication that this case was part of a wider conspiracy to skim money from contracts paid for by the US government for the war effort.
According to the charges filed in the US District Court of the District of Columbia, Pappen simply demanded envelopes stuffed with cash from a Kuwaiti rental agent in exchange for giving the agent the lucrative apartment rental business.
Pappen's job was to locate apartments for Army personnel assigned to Camp Arifjan, a dusty military base near Kuwait's border with Iraq.
The court papers say that he discussed various schemes with the Kuwaiti rental agent, including one that would give Pappen a portion of every monthly rent payment on the apartments.
At one point in the spring of last year, Pappen was described as having teased the rental agent, Fahhad Abdullah Matar, by flashing a US government check for US$363,800 and suggesting that the business would all be Matar's if certain conditions were met.
Shortly afterward, the papers say, Matar received the check and then paid Pappen a US$30,000 bribe at a local Indian restaurant. Pappen is originally from India.
Among other things, his case throws light on the living conditions of US government and military personnel working in Kuwait, where the routine dangers and privations of working in Iraq are largely nonexistent.
The US government was being charged more than US$2,000 a month for some of the apartments that Pappen was renting, the court papers indicate.
But the scheme began to come undone last month, the papers say, when a military officer, apparently suspecting that the apartments were overpriced, confronted Matar, who quickly admitted that he had been paying bribes to Pappen.
Matar then began cooperating with agents in the Army Criminal Investigative Division.
In a sting operation last week in Kuwait, Matar wore a recording device and delivered a US$22,000 bribe while agents listened, the court papers say.
If convicted on the bribery charges, Pappen faces up to 15 years in prison and fines of as much as US$250,000.
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