Navy Corruption Scandal

"Between September 2011 and June 2012, GDMA submitted 117 fake bids for incidentals to the Navy’s pricing database—for one port alone. But those 117 incidents comprised only 35 unique bids. GDMA would often just resubmit the same fraudulent pricing quotes over and over again.

And remember, those [117] quotes were just for one port for a short period of time. GDMA has been doing the same at dozens of ports for years.

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A typical example of this kind of corruption is what the GDMA did to the Navy in Thailand.

American ships require fuel with no biodiesel content. The DLA didn’t have any relationships with fuel vendors in Thailand, so the Navy asked GDMA to see if Bangkok could provide the fuel.

“[Fuel] is unavailable due to Thailand’s regulation that diesel in the country must have a biodiesel content mix which does not meet [Navy] requirements,” GDMA explained in forms provided to the Navy. “GDMA will provide [the Navy with fuel] from its own stocks which are imported and contain no biodisel.”

It was a lie. Bangkok had no regulations requiring a biodiesel mix. So GDMA bought the fuel from local suppliers, then sold it back to the Navy … and not at cost, as its contract required. GDMA overcharged for every gallon of fuel it sold to American ships.

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Any time ships from the Seventh Fleet docked in Thailand, GDMA would take care of the tariffs, then use a fake company to bill the Navy at exorbitant prices.

GDMA billed the Navy about $300,000 when a ship docked at the port of Laem Chabang in Thailand. Prosecutors in the case went back through the Thai port authority’s Website, cross referenced the tariffs charged at the time and got the real total.

The Navy only owed $35,000 for the Seventh Fleet ship."

That was from War is Boring. A Justice Department report is here. And this is how they got away with it for so long:

"Of all [the] cronies, NCIS supervisory agent John Bertrand Beliveau was [the] most important. Beliveau was [GMDA]'s man inside the criminal investigative wing of the Navy. Thanks to the agent’s efforts, [GMDA] was able to stay one step ahead of investigators for years."