A Czech-born Irish citizen has been arrested in the Bahamas on US charges that he paid millions of dollars in bribes in an effort to take control of the state oil company in Azerbaijan, the former communist state in central Asia, writes Arthur Beesley, Senior Business Correspondent.
The United States government is now seeking the extradition of Mr Viktor Kozeny (42), a multi-millionaire who was naturalised in 1995 under the "passports for investment" scheme.
He has been a fugitive from the Czech authorities on separate fraud charges since 2003.
After a long-running investigation by the FBI, Mr Kozeny is charged with leading a conspiracy between 1997 and 1999 to bribe Azeri officials to ensure that a consortium he fronted would gain a controlling interest in the oil company and reap "huge profits" from its ultimate resale in the market.
Their efforts to gain control of the company, which also involved giving $600,000 (€494,723) in jewellery to a senior Azeri official and paying medical bills for others, were ultimately unsuccessful.
Informed Irish sources said last night that the Government was examining whether it could revoke the certificate of naturalisation that was granted to Mr Kozeny by the then Fine Gael TD Nora Owen when she was Minister for Justice in the Rainbow Coalition. This process is at an early stage, however.
No decision has yet been taken to set up a committee of inquiry to investigate the case.
Citizenship legislation demands that such a committee must be established before the Minister for Justice can revoke a certificate of naturalisation.
Mr Kozeny is known to have invested £1 million (€1.27 million) in the Irish Medical Systems software company in 1995. That company was sold to a British concern in 1999.
According to a 64-page indictment by the US Attorney in the Southern District of New York, Mr Kozeny paid millions of dollars to senior officials in the Azeri government, the oil company Socar and the official body that ran the privatisation programme in Azerbaijan.
"Kozeny and others acting under his direction allegedly paid more than $11 million in total to the Azeri officials in May and June 1998, of which approximately $6.9 million was wire-transferred to accounts held for the benefit of certain Azeri officials and their family members, and millions of additional dollars in cash were hand-delivered to one [ official] in his government office," said the US authorities.
Mr Kozeny is alleged to have chartered planes and used his private jet to fly millions of dollars into Azerbaijan for these payments.
He and two other men are also charged with a money-laundering conspiracy, based on wire transfers of millions of dollars to Azerbaijan buy for vouchers they needed to acquire Socar shares.