Navy commander latest to plead guilty in 'Fat Leonard' bribery scandal

Navy commander accused of leaking information to the namesake target of the “Fat Leonard” bribery investigation pleaded guilty Tuesday in San Diego federal court.

Bobby Pitts, 48, of Chesapeake, Va., pleaded guilty to a charge of conspiracy to defraud the United States.

From 2009 to 2011, Pitts was the officer in charge of the U.S. Navy’s Fleet Industrial Supply Command in Singapore, overseeing contracts of husbanding services — such as water, food, trash removal and security — for the Navy’s Seventh Fleet.

In his position he was privy to internal briefings and reports from the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, which was probing allegations that contractor Leonard Glenn Francis had been overbilling the military throughout Southeast Asia ports. read more »

Has Navy culture truly changed after Fat Leonard corruption crisis?

For more than a decade, Malaysian tycoon Leonard Glenn Francis — a rotund grifter better known as “Fat Leonard” — bribed scores of top Navy officers with booze, prostitutes and luxury gifts to bilk the American taxpayer out of at least $35 million in bogus bills.

Leonard’s arrest in a San Diego sting operation nearly four years ago triggered the collapse of his overseas port services company, Glenn Defense Marine Asia, the prosecution of dozens of Navy officers and civilian officials, and the ongoing internal investigation of 30 admirals and more than 200 sailors for corruption.

When the Navy began probing Glenn Defense for inflated invoices, fake work orders and inexplicable cost overruns, investigators soon realized that Fat Leonard’s moles had infiltrated key sectors of the military’s logistics and law-enforcement branches, feeding him classified information on warship movements while choking inquiries into the fraud.

While the scandal mostly has played out in federal court, the Navy quietly has been rolling out a series of reforms designed to strengthen its leaders, battle corruption and ensure a con man can’t assume Fat Leonard’s mantle. read more »

Is LIBOR the Benchmark for Trillions of Dollars in Transactions, a Lie?

It was easy to miss, with the impending end of civilization burning up the headlines, but a beyond-belief financial story recently crept into public view.

A Bloomberg headline on the story was a notable achievement in the history of understatement. It read:

LIBOR'S UNCERTAIN FUTURE TRIGGERS $350 TRILLION SUCCESSION HEADACHE

The casual news reader will see the term "LIBOR" and assume this is just a postgame wrapup to the LIBOR scandal of a few years back, in which may of the world's biggest banks were caught manipulating interest rates….It isn't. read more »

For Rajat Gupta, Returning Is a Hard Road

After going to prison for a Wall Street scandal, the once-revered executive finds former friends divided about accepting him back into their lives.

One June evening last year, some of New York’s most prominent Indian-Americans gathered at a gated house in Rye, N.Y.

A few dozen Indian-American businessmen and their bejeweled wives, some decked out in colorful salwar kameezes, had arrived at the home of Ajit Jain, a top executive at Warren E. Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway, say people who were invited to the dinner. They were there to welcome back an old friend, Rajat K. Gupta.

Only two months before, Mr. Gupta had finished a two-year prison sentence for divulging corporate secrets to Raj Rajaratnam, the hedge fund titan now serving the longest sentence ever for insider trading. read more »