AFP - A former unit of US conglomerate Halliburton agreed to pay 579 million dollars in criminal and civil penalties to settle a long probe into bribery in Nigeria, US officials said Wednesday.
   
Authorities said the agreement represented the second largest fine ever in connection with the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.
   
Kellogg Brown & Root LLC pleaded guilty Wednesday to charges related to "its participation in a decade-long scheme to bribe Nigerian government officials" to obtain contracts, the Justice Department said.
   
As part of the plea agreement, KBR agreed to pay a 402 million dollar criminal fine.
   
KBR and Halliburton jointly agreed to pay 177 million dollars in disgorgement of profits relating to the violations, officials said.
   
Officials said the global engineering group had been under investigation for its dealings to obtain contracts to build liquefied natural gas facilities on Bonny Island, Nigeria, valued at more than six billion dollars.
   
KBR, spun off by Halliburton in 2006, was part of a venture that was awarded four contracts between 1995 and 2004.
   
The contracts were awarded to a four-company joint venture involving KBR, which at the time was a subsidiary of Halliburton, an oil services group once headed by Dick Cheney, the former US vice president.
   
"Today's guilty plea by KBR ends one chapter in the department's long-running investigation of corruption in the award of six billion dollars in construction contracts in Nigeria," said acting assistant attorney General Rita Glavin.
   
"This bribery scheme involved both senior foreign government officials and KBR corporate executives who took actions to insulate themselves from the reach of US law enforcement.
   
The case "demonstrates that no one is above the law, and that the department is determined to seek penalties that are commensurate with, and will deter, this kind of serious criminal misconduct," Glavin added.
   
Last September, former KBR executive Albert Stanley pleaded guilty to related charges, and could face imprisonment at his sentencing scheduled for May 6.
   
Halliburton as far back as 2004 acknowledged that improper payments "may have been made" to Nigerian officials through a consortium of which it was a member.
   
The probe centered around TSKJ, a private limited liability company registered in Portugal comprising Technip of France; Snamprogetti Netherlands, an affiliate of the Italian group ENI; JGC Corporation of Japan; and Kellogg Brown & Root.