LOS ANGELES – Keith Hunter, a 62-year-old former executive at Commonwealth Bank of Australia, has been charged in a federal court with participating in a scheme to fraudulently generate revenue for a software company.
According to the charges, Hunter, a United States citizen who was the executive general manager in charge of infrastructure and operations at CBA, conspired with several co-conspirators in Australia and the United States to defraud Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC) by inflating revenues for a Santa Monica-based company that CSC was purchasing, ServiceMesh, Inc.
The scheme, which allegedly took place in late 2013 and early 2014, involved CBA purchasing $10 million in goods and services from ServiceMesh. CBA employees, including Hunter, received undisclosed kickbacks from a senior executive of ServiceMesh in exchange for awarding the contracts to ServiceMesh.
Solely as a result of the scheme, ServiceMesh reached a performance goal that triggered CSC to pay a $98 million ‘earnout payment’ to ServiceMesh shareholders in March 2014. The ‘earnout payment’ funded the kickbacks paid to CBA employees, including payments to Hunter of approximately $630,000.
The scheme allegedly caused CSC to suffer nearly $100 million in losses when it made the unwarranted earnout payment that followed a base payment of $163 million for ServiceMesh.
Hunter has pleaded guilty and is currently pending sentencing on bribery charges in an Australian court. Authorities in the United States expect Hunter to face the charges filed today after he completes any sentence he receives in Australia.
The two counts in the information together carry a statutory maximum penalty of 45 years in federal prison.
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Key Facts
- State: California
- Category: Fraud & Financial Crimes
- Source: DOJ Press Release â†â€â€
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