Maryland resident Vadim Mikerin stands accused of arranging more than US$ 2 million in corrupt payments to help US companies win contracts with Rosatom, the Russian state nuclear company.
Mikerin, 56, was arrested in late October 2014. He was an executive at the Maryland-based Tenam, a subsidiary of Tenex, which is owned by Rosatom.
Tenex supplies uranium and enrichment services to nuclear power companies globally.
The US Department of Justice says Mikerin colluded with Daren Condrey, co-president and managing partner at the Maryland-based firm Transport Logistics International (TLI), which had been contracted to transport uranium from Russia to the US for Tenex since 1996.
Mikerin allegedly conspired with Condrey to award uranium shipment contracts to the TLI, bypassing bidding procedures. In turn, he received kickbacks from the firm through offshore transactions, said prosecutors. Cash was transferred to bank accounts in Cyprus, Latvia and Switzerland.
Prosecutors believe another defendant, Boris Rubizhevsky, and his company Nexgen Security acted as a middleman for the kickback transactions.
The conspirators allegedly used codewords for the payments such as “lucky figure”, “LF” or “cake”.
Rubizhevsky, 64, and Condrey, 50, both pleaded guilty to involvement in June 2015, and will be sentenced in October and November respectively.
Through his guilty plea on Monday, Mikerin accepted the accusation that the funds were intended to influence him to secure illicit business advantages for the US companies doing business with Tenex.
The total amount transferred from the US to the bank accounts of offshore shell companies was US$ 2,126,622. That amount will be seized by the court from Mikerin as part of his plea bargain.
The court is expected to sentence Mikerin on Dec. 8.
A lawyer for Rosatom said earlier this year that the state-owned Russian firm had cooperated with the US investigation, and that other officials linked to the company had no part in wrongdoing.
