A former United States Department of State employee has been sentenced to 12 months in prison for conspiring to commit “honest services” fraud linked to Bermuda.
In handing down the ruling, Damian Williams, the Jamaican American United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, said May Salehi, a long time US State Department employee, “was involved in evaluating bids for critical overseas government construction projects such as US embassies and consulates.
Williams, whose father is a Jamaica-born doctor, said in a statement that 66-year-old Salehi “gave confidential inside bidding information to a government contractor and received US$60,000 in kickback payments in return.”
“As a State Department employee, May Salehi was entrusted to serve the public,” he added. “Instead, she abused her position to line her own pockets.
“Salehi revealed, and traded on, confidential information—corrupting the bidding process and receiving lucrative kickbacks in return,” Williams continued. “Thanks to our partners at the State Department’s Office of Inspector General, Salehi’s crime of deception has been uncovered, and Salehi has now been sentenced to prison.”
According to the allegations in the Information, court filings, and statements made in court, from 1991 until mid-2021, Salehi, for many years, worked as an engineer in the State Department’s Overseas Building Operations division (“OBO”), which directs the worldwide overseas building program for the State Department and the US Government community serving abroad.
In 2016, Williams said the US State Department solicited bids for a multimillion-dollar construction project, known as a compound security upgrade, to be performed at the US Consulate in Bermuda – called the “Bermuda Project”.
He said the bidding process involved the submission of blind, sealed bids from various bidders.
Williams said six companies submitted sealed bids, one of which was named Montage. The US Attorney said Salehi was involved in the Bermuda Project in several respects.
Among other things, he said she served as the chair of the Technical Evaluation Panel (“TEP”)—a panel of experts that evaluates the technical aspects of bids, including whether they meet the State Department’s structural and security needs.
In connection with the Bermuda Project, Williams said the TEP determined that five bids—including Montage’s bid—were technically acceptable.
In September 2016, he said the State Department’s employees, who evaluate the cost of bids, gave these five bidders—including Montage—the opportunity to re-bid if they wished to do so.
Williams said Montage had two days to decide whether to submit a re-bid. During that two-day window, he said Montage’s principal, Sina Moayedi, contacted May Salehi by phone to seek confidential inside bidding information about the relationship between Montage’s bid and those of its competitors.
Montage was ultimately awarded the Bermuda Project with a revised bid of US$6.3 million.
In the months that followed, Williams said Moayedi provided Salehi a total of US$60,000 in kickbacks, “which he paid in three installments.”
In making these kickback payments, Williams said Moayedi used intermediaries to obscure the link between him and Salehi.
To conceal the true purpose of the kickback payments, as she had suggested, the US Attorney said Salehi gave Moayedi a Persian rug “by providing it to an intermediary who passed it to Moayedi.”
Williams said Salehi did not report the US$60,000 kickback payments on her taxes, her State Department financial disclosure forms, or her application to renew her top-secret national security clearance.
In addition to her prison sentence, the US Attorney said Salehi was sentenced to three years of supervised release.
May Salehi was also ordered to forfeit US$60,000 and to pay a US$500,000 fine, Williams said.
He said Moayedi has been charged with wire fraud, conspiracy to commit wire fraud, conspiracy to commit “honest services” wire fraud, and major fraud against the United States. The charges against Moayedi are pending, Williams said.
CMC/
