When we arrived Monday morning at the courtroom of Manhattan federal district judge Shira Scheindlin, a key government witness, Thomas Ferrell, was on the stand. Ferrell, a Virginian, was the right-hand man in Azerbaijan during the late 1990s for Czech expatriate Viktor Kozeny, who led a group of foreign investors–including Bourke–in the attempt to buy Socar. Last week, Ferrell testified on direct examination that he interacted with many of the investors, but that he only discussed the bribery scheme with Bourke. In his defense Bourke has argued that Kozeny bilked him out of millions of dollars and that he did not know about the bribery scheme.
But Ferrell has some major credibility issues. For one, in 2003 he pled guilty to one count of violating the FCPA and to another count of conspiring to violate the FCPA. (His former boss, Kozeny, has been indicted in the Azerbaijan case, but has so far avoided prosecution efforts to extradite him from the Bahamas.) Ferrell has also admitted to receiving a $700,000 bonus from Kozeny in the late 1990s, which he somehow forget to mention in his tax returns.
