The former president and CEO of the Louis Berger Group, an international engineering consulting company, has surrendered to the Federal Bureau of Investigation and is now facing six counts of conspiracy and fraud charges in connection with a scheme to overbill the U.S. Agency for International Development for overseas reconstruction contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan.
According to the indictment released Oct. 20, Derish Wolff is charged with one count of conspiring to defraud and intentionally overbill USAID and five counts of making false claims in relation to those billings.
Wolff served as president and CEO of Louise Berger from 1982 to 2002 and more recently as chairman of the firm’s parent company. He faces a maximum of 10 years in prison for the conspiracy charge and up to five years in prison for each of the false claims counts. All six charges carry a maximum $250,000 fine each, or twice the amount of money loss from the offense.
In August 2010, U.S. federal prosecutors opened a probe into whether the Louis Berger Group overcharged the government. The probe, which is part of a three-year investigation on the group, focused on allegedly inflated invoices the company submitted to USAID.
Louis Berger agreed to pay in November 2010 some $69.3 million in criminal and civil penalties. The firm was not banned from participating in future USAID contracts based on these remedial efforts.
Meanwhile, two former employees of the company also pleaded guilty in a federal court in New Jersey to overbilling the U.S. government from 2001 to 2007.
Read more:
Read more development aid news online, and subscribe to The Development Newswire to receive top international development headlines from the world’s leading donors, news sources and opinion leaders — emailed to you FREE every business day.
