Ex-UN consultants jailed for bribes over drugs supplied to ‘starving Africans’
Guido Bakker sentenced to one year and Sijbrandus Scheffer to 15 months after rigging pharmaceutical contracts for DRC
Two former UN consultants have been jailed by a UK court for receiving bribes to rig contracts worth £66m to supply life-saving drugs to the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Guido Bakker, 41, and Sijbrandus Scheffer, 63, took payments totalling £650,000 from a Danish pharmaceutical company called Missionpharma in return for helping them win lucrative contracts.
Scheffer joked they were making money by selling overpriced drugs “to dying and starving Africans”, London’s Southwark crown court heard.
Sentencing the pair on Wednesday, Judge Michael Grieve said: “It is corruption in the context of a very large grant for the relief of disease in one of the most deprived countries on earth.”
Turning to the two former humanitarian workers as they stood in the dock, the judge said they were guilty of flagrant corruption. He said: “Flagrance and dishonesty was the theme of the conduct of you both in committing these offences.”
The pair hoped to make as much as £44m from the plot.
Scheffer, of Swanley, Kent, was jailed for 15 months while Bakker, who lives in the Netherlands, was jailed for a year. The pair could be out of prison in months, as it is likely they will only have to serve half their sentence.
Their company, World Response Consulting, obtained contracts from the UN Development Programme to combat HIV and malaria in the war-ravaged African country.
They used their inside knowledge to leak crucial details to Missionpharma to “stack the deck” in favour of the company in its UN bid.
The men, both Dutch nationals, used their London-based solicitor Patrick Orr to set up a firm to receive these corrupt payments.
They disguised their cash through a network of offshore companies and splashed out on properties in some of London’s most exclusive districts, including Maida Vale and Hampstead.
Grieve said the men were both equal partners in the plot, from which they hoped to pocket millions. The judge said: “This was, in my view, to be your secret fund channelled through a network of companies in order to disguise your benefit, and for you to draw from as equal partners. The major expenditure out of it was earmarked for the London property market.
“I do note your motivation and genuine desire to lend your help to people in the world in desperate need of it.
“I think you saw this as an opportunity to get something back for yourselves by way of a payout – a deserved pension – and you took it. It involved blatant dishonesty.”
The court heard the two men were driven by financial greed and bragged about how they could make money from “starving Africans”.
In an email in May 2006 to Bakker about how to “make loads of cash now”, Scheffer wrote: “Clearly supplying small amounts of grossly overpriced drugs to dying and starving Africans is a very good start.”
The pair hid their links to Missionpharma as they promoted the company to the UN. Scheffer wrote that “it would be a sort of corporate Armageddon” if the truth came out.
He added that payments for the contracts needed to be “unseeable by outside eyes”.
But in 2007 the UN launched an investigation into the men and how the contracts were awarded. They were arrested the following year.
Scheffer was found guilty of accepting or obtaining corrupt payments, fraudulent trading and transferring the proceeds of crime, and Bakker pleaded guilty to accepting or obtaining corrupt payments.
Orr, 48, was earlier found guilty of being concerned with money laundering and given a two-year prison sentence suspended for 12 months.
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