Jorge Granados, Bribery, Money Laundering, Florida 2010

Former Executives Charged with Bribing Honduran Officials

MIAMI, FL – Jorge Granados and Manuel Caceres, the former chief executive officer and vice president of business development, respectively, for Miami-based telecommunications company Latin Node Inc. (LatiNode), have been charged with allegedly paying more than $500,000 in bribes to government officials in Honduras.

Granados, 54, and Caceres, 64, are charged with 19 counts of criminal violations of the anti-bribery provisions of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) and international money laundering. The indictment was returned by a federal grand jury in Miami on December 14, 2010, and was unsealed today.

According to court documents, LatiNode provided wholesale telecommunications services using Internet protocol technology to countries throughout the world, including Honduras. In December 2005, LatiNode learned that it was the sole winner of an “interconnection agreement” with Empresa Hondureña de Telecomunicaciones (Hondutel), the wholly state-owned telecommunications authority in Honduras.

The agreement permitted LatiNode to use Hondutel’s telecommunications lines in order to establish a network between Honduras and the United States and provide long distance services between the two countries. LatiNode was required to pay Hondutel a set rate per minute for calls to Honduras.

According to the indictment, the defendants sought a reduction in the rates payable to Hondutel and learned that a newly elected high-ranking government official’s friend had been made a manager of Hondutel, who considered rescinding the agreement with LatiNode. Caceres allegedly informed Granados and another LatiNode executive by e-mail that “it would be necessary to ‘give’ something to the [Hondutel] general manager [ ].”

The defendants and other LatiNode executives agreed to a secret deal to pay bribes to the manager, as well as to a senior attorney for Hondutel who acted as the manager’s “straw man,” and to a minister in the Honduran government.

Granados and Caceres were arrested today in Miami and made initial appearances in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida. The case is being prosecuted by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Florida.

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