Posted by Kyle Beck.
When someone is looking for an easy target to steal money from, they do not usually decide pick the US military. That is not the case for Alex Wisidagama, the global manager of Glenn Defense Marine Asia, who overbilled the maritime branch of the US military by more than $34 million. He, along with his cousin Leonard Glenn Francis who is the top executive of GDMA, and ten other naval officers have been charged in the case and “all but one has pleaded guilty.” Wisidagama has been sentenced to five years while his lawyer argues that he should only be given thirty months.
The naval officers pleaded guilty to bribery and “diverting ships to Asian ports where the company owned the port or the port had lax oversight, allowing GDMA to inflate prices.”
While GSMA has done business with US naval ships in Asia for 25 years, investigators are still looking into how long the maritime branch has been getting overcharged. Investigators are currently focused on Francis, because he admitted to providing “an exhaustive list of gifts, including payments for prostitutes, concert tickets and luxury hotel stays for Naval officers in exchange for classified information that helped his company carry out the scheme.” This comes as a huge problem for Wisidagama because, according to his lawyer, no one in Wisidagama’s position after this case would be able to pay off the charges, because he is not allowed to ever work on government contracts.
Kyle is an economics major in the Stillman School of Business, Seton Hall University, Class of 2018.