At Home In The Wasteland » Whatever happened to Efraim Diveroli?

Whatever happened to Efraim Diveroli?

That’s the 22 year old guy who ran AEY Inc., the company that landed the nearly $300 million government contract to supply ammunition to Afghan security forces, and fulfilled it by giving the Afghans substandard ammunition that was made in China.
Anyways, Efraim and the other AEY “executives” were recently indicted on charges of fraud and conspiracy:

According to the indictment, Mr. Diveroli, his colleagues and the company sought “to unjustly enrich themselves” by shipping aged Chinese rifle cartridges to Afghanistan after claiming they were made in Albania. The Army contract and American law prohibit trading in Chinese arms.
[...]
The charges cap a federal criminal investigation that began last year into the dealings of the fledgling company and its group of 20-something executives. The American military relied on them to be a principal supplier of ammunition to the Afghan security forces.
In March, the Army suspended Mr. Diveroli and the company from future federal contracts, contending that he sent a different shipment of Chinese cartridges to Afghanistan after certifying that they were made in Hungary. A month later, the State Department suspended the company’s international export activities, blocking its other business.
“This is a sobering development,” Representative Henry A. Waxman, a California Democrat who leads the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, said in a statement on Friday. “The more we learn about AEY, the more questions we have.”
Before the charges were announced, the committee had said it would hold a hearing next Tuesday on AEY’s activities.

Whoa! Congress is actually holding a hearing on something that matters?! But what about the use of steroids in horse racing?!

In January 2007, the Army awarded AEY a contract, potentially worth $298 million, that made it the primary munitions supplier for Afghan security forces in the fight against Al Qaeda and the Taliban.
According to the indictment, the contract required AEY to certify that it was providing “serviceable and safe ammunition.” The Army contract also banned supplying ammunition acquired “directly or indirectly from a Communist Chinese military company.”
But the charges accuse the AEY employees and the associate of providing “instructions and guidance” on how to remove Chinese markings from the ammunition, to conceal its origins. With each shipment to Afghanistan, the charges say, Mr. Diveroli falsely certified that the Chinese rifle and machine-gun cartridges were manufactured in Albania.
Federal authorities said that based on these false submissions, the Army paid AEY about $10.3 million for 35 shipments of Chinese ammunition.
An examination by The New York Times earlier this year uncovered documents from Albania that showed that AEY bought more than 100 million Chinese cartridges that had been stored for decades in former cold war stockpiles. Mr. Diveroli then arranged to have them repacked in cardboard boxes, many of which split or decomposed after shipment to the war zones. Different lots or types of ammunition were mixed. In some cases the ammunition was dirty, corroded or covered with a film.

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