HOUSTON – Prosecutors say a former energy trader from Houston has pleaded guilty to his role in a bribery scheme with Mexican government officials to secure contracts.
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Court documents say Javier Aguilar, 50, and other co-conspirators paid about $600,000 in bribes to senior officials at PEMEX Procurement Interional Inc. (PPI) in exchange for assisting in winning business.
Aguilar was a trader in Vitol Inc., the U.S. affiliate of the largest independent energy trading firm in the world, working in their Houston office. Between 2017 and 2020, prosecutors say the bribe money was used to obtain several contracts for Vitol to supply hundreds of millions of dollars to PPI’s wholly-owned affiliate of the Mexican state-oiled company Petróleos Mexicanos (PEMEX).
To hide the scheme, Aguilar and his co-conspirators, court records claim, used a series of contracts, sham invoices, and shell entities based in Curaçao and Mexico. They also used alias email accounts to discuss the scheme with code words for the bribes like “shoes,” “medicine,” “invitations,” and “coffee.”
“The Southern District of Texas (SDTX) is ground zero in the fight against foreign bribery and corruption in Latin America,” said U.S. Attorney Alamdar S. Hamdani. “My office’s prosecutors - experts on the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) - will continue to bring justice against those who damage the integrity of Texas’s vital energy sector with illegal advantages fueled by greed. This guilty plea begins the process of repairing the damage caused by Aguilar as well as put on notice those who might seek to emulate him and his cohorts.”
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Aguilar is one of seven co-conspirators who have pleaded guilty for their respective roles in the scheme and are awaiting sentencing. They have agreed to forfeit more than $63 million in connection with this and related schemes.
As part of his guilty plea, Aguilar consented to transfer the Texas case to New York, to consolidate the cases and to forfeit over $7 million. The plea follows Aguilar’s related conviction at trial in February for conspiracy to violate the FCPA, violating the FCPA, and conspiracy to commit money laundering in connection with schemes to bribe Ecuadorian and Mexican officials. He faces a maximum sentence of 20 years in federal prison on the money laundering conviction and five years on each of the other offenses.