A former defence contractor has been sentenced to 15 years in prison in the United States, prosecutors said, for being behind one of the biggest scandals in the military that involved bribing dozens of US Navy officers.
Leonard Glenn Francis was sentenced in a San Diego federal court and ordered to pay $20m in restitution to the navy, along with a $150,000 fine, according to a statement from the US Attorney’s Office on Tuesday.
Additionally, Malaysian national Francis – also known as “Fat Leonard” due to his large stature – was ordered by US District Judge Janis L Sammartino to forfeit $35m in “ill-gotten proceeds from his crimes”.
Prosecutors said the sentence resulted from Francis’s first guilty plea in 2015 concerning bribery and fraud, his extensive cooperation with the government since then, and another guilty plea on Tuesday for failing to appear for his original sentencing hearing in 2022.
Shortly before he was due to be sentenced in September 2022, Francis cut off a GPS ankle monitor he was wearing while under house arrest and fled the country. He was under house arrest after being hospitalised and treated for renal cancer and other medical issues.
He set off an international search after fleeing to Mexico before making his way to Cuba and eventually getting to Venezuela.
He was arrested by Venezuelan authorities about two weeks after his disappearance as he was trying to board a flight at the Simon Bolivar international airport outside the capital, Caracas.
Venezuelan officials said he intended to reach Russia. He was brought back to the US in December 2023.
The 60-year-old Francis now has an estimated eight and a half years in prison remaining since he was initially arrested in San Diego in 2013 and remained in pretrial custody until late 2017, when a court released him pending sentencing for medical reasons.
According to prosecutors, Francis and his company, Glenn Defense Marine Asia (GDMA), which provided services to US Navy ships in Asia Pacific ports, gave co-conspirators millions of dollars in items of value, including more than $500,000 in cash.
He also spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on bribing officers with sex parties, travel expenses, hotel stays, spa treatments, lavish meals, top-shelf alcohol and wine, and luxury gifts that included Kobe beef, Cuban cigars and ornamental swords.
Prosecutors said Francis admitted that in return, navy personnel advocated on behalf of him and GDMA during the procurement process, providing classified information about various Navy ships’ port visits and competitors’ bids for navy contracts.
GDMA was also ordered to pay a fine of $36m.
The cases were handled by the US Attorney’s Office in an effort to be independent of the military justice system.
But what Sammartino last year called “flagrant misconduct” by the lead federal prosecutor in the cases of four former navy officers involved with Francis led to felony convictions of the military officers being vacated.
Sammartino, however, ruled that the misconduct was not enough to dismiss the large-scale bribery and fraud case.
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