. . . to the tune of $6,600. In the civil penalties information released today by the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (“OFAC”), the agency reported that Willbros, a Texas-based oil and gas drilling services company, paid $6,600 to settle charges that the company

through a former Senior Vice President, willfully violated the Sudanese Sanctions Regulations (the “Regulations”) when it entered into a contract to bid on an oil development project in Sudan, despite its knowledge that such activities violated the Regulations, by facilitating the export of goods, technology or services to Sudan and evading the prohibitions set forth in the Regulations.

A Willbros SEC filing provides a little more detail on the alleged violation:

Acts carried out by Mr. [James] Tillery and others acting under his direction with respect to a bid for work in Sudan may constitute facilitation efforts prohibited by U.S. law, a violation of U.S. trade sanctions and the unauthorized export of technical information.

In December 2008, Tillery was indicted for violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act in connection with bribes paid to officials of Ecuador and Nigeria to retain business with the state-owned oil companies in those countries. Tillery remains at large. Willbros itself paid $22 million dollars to settle criminal charges in connection with these bribes.

The OFAC description of the violation is that Tillery “entered into a contract to bid” on the Sudanese oil project. There is no claim that Willbros actually bid on, or even worked on, the Sudanese oil project, which makes it somewhat unclear as to how the regulations were violated. If I agree with a friend to take a trip to Cuba, I haven’t violated the Cuba sanctions until I actually take the trip.

But, of course, there’s always the issue of facilitation, and OFAC claims that this contract somehow facilitated a violation whether or not a bid was ever made. If I don’t go to Cuba but my friend later does, then the facilitation argument, in its broadest since, is that I facilitated that violation by proposing the trip. (Hemingway might also, if he were still around, be guilty of facilitation by writing books that indirectly encourage his fans to visit his home and drinking haunts in Havana.)

And although this may all seem a stretch, it is consistent with OFAC’s broad concept of facilitation in which the butterfly that flaps its wings in Western Africa arguably facilitates the hurricane that a month later slams into the Atlantic coast of Florida.

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Copyright © 2009 Clif Burns. All Rights Reserved.
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