By SEGUN ADIO with agency reports

Jason Steph, 37, is charged with conspiring to make over six million dollars in bribe payments to Nigerian officials (names withheld) to obtain and retain gas pipeline construction business from a joint venture majority-owned and controlled by the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC).

The four-count indictment unsealed in a federal court in Houston, Texas, accuses Steph, a US citizen residing in Kazakhstan, of violations of the federal Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.

Steph was also charged with money laundering based upon the international transfer of some of the alleged bribe money, the Justice Department said.

Wilbros is a Houston-based, publicly-traded company that provides construction, engineering and other services in the oil and gas industry but recently divested, selling its Nigerian operations to a new, mostly Nigerian-owned company.

Steph worked at Wilbros International Inc., a subsidiary that conducts the group’s international operations. The indictment alleges a conspiracy from late 2003 through March 2005 when Steph was general manager at Willbros International’s on-shore operations in Nigeria. It alleges a conspiracy that included Steph, two individuals acting in Nigeria as purported consultants to Willbros and others, to make millions of dollars in corrupt payments to help win a major gas pipeline engineering, procurement and construction project, the Justice Department said.

Willbros and an unnamed German consortium partner submitted bids for the project, known as the Eastern Gas Gathering System (EGGS), for approximately $387 million. In exchange for the award of the project, the conspirators allegedly paid, promised to pay, and authorized payments to officials of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corp., its joint-venture investment unit, a senior official in the executive branch of the Nigerian federal government, and others, the US Justice Department said.

NewAge was unable to obtain any reaction from the NNPC last night.