Discounted apartments and cash were given to a former United Nations procurement official and two other U.N. workers got nights with prostitutes to help secure $100 million in U.N. contracts, a businessman testified Tuesday at a bribery trial.
The witness, Nishan Kohli, provided many of the details at the heart of the government's case against Sanjaya Bahel, who was chief of the U.N.'s Commodity Procurement Section from 1999 to 2003. Bahel, 57, is charged with bribery, wire fraud and mail fraud.
Kohli testified in U.S. District Court in Manhattan that Bahel was so helpful to the Kohli family in securing about two dozen contracts that he was "effectively a partner in our companies in terms of how we operated and executed contracts."
He said Bahel met his father, Nanak Kohli, when the men worked in Washington, D.C., in the early 1980s and socialized with a group of people who had moved to the United States from India. The Kohli family had several businesses and looked to expand revenues by exploiting its relationship with Bahel, he said.
He said that Bahel spoke with his father frequently, and that to hide the frequency of the conversations from scrutiny, the family gave Bahel a cell phone.
