In late 2017, globe-trotting millionaire businessman Saman Ahsani invited The New York Times into his Monaco apartment to set the record straight about how his reputation had been unjustly “shredded” by Australian reporters.

It was one of the few interviews any member of the Ahsani family would ever conduct. The Times was targeted by expensive London public relations agents on the Unaoil payroll in the hope that the storied newspaper would present a sympathetic portrayal of a family exposed by The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald for running a corrupt global business empire founded on kickbacks, money laundering and fear.

Saman Ahsani, chief operating officer of Unaoil in Monaco, in 2017.Credit:Rebecca Marshall/The New York Times

In the interview, the then-43-year-old Oxford-educated Ahsani defended the work of the family’s company, global energy market consultant Unaoil. He denied the company had repeatedly paid bribes to powerful officials across the world to secure contracts worth billions of dollars for Unaoil’s clients, which included companies such as Rolls-Royce, Halliburton, Samsung and Australia’s Leighton Holdings (now called CIMIC).

“We’re portrayed as this brass-plate money-laundering operation,” Ahsani told the Times in a piece that highlighted both the emotional toll of the Australian expose on the family and the sensational, albeit denied, claims of corruption.

Ahsani’s brother, Unaoil chief executive Cyrus Ahsani, had been sent into a “deep depression”, while his father, the octogenarian family patriarch and Unaoil founder and chairman Ata Ahsani, had experienced worsening heart palpitations.

“It’d be tough for anyone, especially when you think this is all completely unjustified,” Saman Ahsani was quoted as saying.

“With just a few phone calls, you can see this is a company that, year in, year out, is delivering projects for large companies.”

Last week, a stony-faced Saman Ahsani sat silently with a trio of top-flight defence lawyers in a Houston court as he was sentenced to a year and a day in jail.

Gone were his pleas of innocence. Instead, the court heard how Ahsani became an FBI informer after admitting to being at the centre of a “pervasive and wide-ranging criminal enterprise” that enriched “corrupt government officials” across the Middle East, Africa and central Asia.

In presenting their case, American prosecutors told Judge Andrew Hanen that Unaoil’s rampant corrupt conduct came at the “expense of the citizens whose countries were destabilised by this corruption”.

‘Bribery is part of the game.’

“[Saman Ahsani] did it over and over again for years in country after country and deal after deal,” prosecutors told the court.

Hanen said Ahsani’s relatively minimal sentence – he was also fined $US1.5 million ($2.12 million) – reflected the Unaoil executive’s decision to take “on numerous risks to assist the US” to investigate the role of the firm’s multinational company clients in financing the bribes.

But, just as the Ahsanis’ public relations advisers had landed their attempt at reputation restoration in the world’s most influential newspaper, an anti-corruption investigator who wished to remain anonymous and who probed the Unaoil case said Saman Ahsani’s ability to land a lighter sentence in America revealed how money and influence can tip the scales of justice.

While it was never mentioned in his US sentencing hearing, law enforcement sources have confirmed that the United Kingdom’s Serious Fraud Office (SFO), working in partnership with the Australian Federal Police, initially envisaged a minimum 10-year jail sentence in an English jail for the Ahsani trio.

“We wanted to put them away for years,” one source said.

There was an abundance of evidence of bribery to suggest this was a feasible outcome.

In 2016, The Age and the Herald revealed the key contents of hundreds of thousands of leaked Unaoil emails – many written in code – which showed how the company had acted as a global bagman for dozens of major companies.

The emails described million-dollar bribes as “holidays”, gave corrupt politicians and middlemen code names like “the doctor” and “Mr Lighthouse” and complained about greedy officials who wanted bigger bribes. The emails also exposed how Leighton’s billion-dollar-plus contracts in Iraq were allegedly won via graft.

But Saman Ahsani and his family had a plan to avoid or minimise jail time.

According to a recent British inquiry into the SFO’s handling of the Unaoil scandal, the Ahsanis hired a former US law enforcement official-turned-fixer to advise them and went on a form of criminal justice jurisdiction shopping.

The fixer sought to influence the British agency’s case by dealing directly with the head of the SFO, Lisa Osofsky, herself a former American official. The inquiry was scathing of Osofsky for her dealings with the Ahsanis’ middleman.

If the Ahsanis had landed in Australia, they could have been charged with conspiracy to bribe and faced jail sentences of many years.

They ultimately decided the American system offered the best chance of avoiding serious punishment.

Court records and briefings from law enforcement officials have confirmed that Saman and Cyrus cut a deal with US authorities behind the back of their British counterparts, and turned FBI informers.

This decision has enabled the US government to force several multinationals to pay hundreds of millions of dollars for their role in the international bribery conspiracy.

Sources have said that Cyrus Ahsani may also play a key role in the ongoing prosecution of former Leighton executives in Australia.

But the Ahsanis’ US deal also gave Saman the best chance of a lesser sentence. Unsealed justice department documents describe how the US Department of Justice agreed with the Ahsanis’ lawyers to not fight aspects of Saman’s case for leniency.

Cyrus Ahsani will face sentencing later this year. Ata Ahsani has avoided jail time and been fined $US2.5 million ($3.5 million) as part of his US plea deal. Several of the UK prosecutions of Unaoil fixers have also collapsed due to the failings of the SFO exposed by the subsequent inquiry.

The AFP may be the only law enforcement agency that delivers a substantive result in the Unaoil scandal in terms of jail time. The court cases of the ex-Leighton accused are still in their early stages and a jury may yet find the charged Australian executives not guilty.

The AFP currently has several major ongoing anti-foreign bribery cases on its books, but most of these have been hampered by the difficulties faced by investigators in unpicking offshore corporate crime and dealing with companies backed by top-tier law firms.

The whistleblower who helped this masthead expose the Unaoil scandal and the underbelly of the global oil industry in 2016 offered a mixed view on Saman Ahsani’s sentencing. Some time in a jail cell was better than none, he said.

But he also described how the message the American justice system had delivered the world was that “bribery is part of the game”.

“That’s why Saman Ahsani got a light sentence,” he said.

Nick McKenzie was the reporter who led the team that revealed the Unaoil corruption scandal in 2016. Know more about corruption? Contact [email protected]

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