A court in Oslo has sentenced an American chief legal advisor of the giant Norwegian fertilizer company Yara International to seven years in prison over his central role in Norway’s biggest corruption scandal.
On Tuesday, the Borgarting Appeal Courts extended Kendrick Wallace’s sentence from two-and-a-half years to seven years, for his “central role” in aggravated bribery in Libya and India.
In December, an Oslo appeals court had cleared three other former executives, including two Norwegians and a French, in the case, but upheld a guilty verdict against Wallace.
In January 2014, the partly state-owned Yara paid a record $38.5 million in fines for bribing top Libyan and Indian officials in an attempt to win contracts. The Norwegian media has called the case “the biggest corruption scandal” in the history of the country.
Yara had paid at least $5 million in bribes to the son of Libya's ex-oil minister Shukri Ghanem, who served under former dictator Muammar Gaddafi, in connection with construction of a fertilizer plant, the National Oil Corporation (NOC) and the Libyan Investment Authority (LIA) in the North African country.