An American ex-contractor pleaded guilty to bribery and visa conspiracies while working on behalf of U.S. interests in Afghanistan during the war, the Department of Justice announced Wednesday.
Orlando Clark, along with his co-conspirator, Todd Coleman, personally pocketed $400,000 in bribes from an Afghan company in exchange for funneling millions in roughly a dozen contracts to the unnamed organization between 2011 and 2013, according to the Justice Department.
In a later plot, Clark allegedly also received bribes to sign at least 12 fallacious letters of recommendation for Afghans looking to support their special immigrant visa applications, according to prosecutors.
Read Next: National Security, Veterans Hurt by Impasse over House Speaker, Lawmakers Warn
Over a roughly two-year period, Clark and Coleman schemed to give the CEO of the Afghan company “confidential information” about the procurement process to maximize the funding that the organization would receive in U.S. government contracts, prosecutors said. To hide the scheme, the pair opened a series of phony companies in 2012 to feed the bribes into a bank account under the guise of a legitimate car-exporting business in the United Arab Emirates.
For example, on Sept. 17, 2012, an Afghan bank in Kabul wired $90,000 to a bank in Atlanta, Georgia, as “payment for vehicles”; it was a bribe, according to court documents.
Over the next year, Clark and the unnamed CEO…
