A former senior technology executive at Commonwealth Bank of Australia, has been sentenced to three-and-a-half years in prison for bribery offences.
Keith Hunter was found guilty of dishonestly causing financial disadvantage by deception, and being an agent corruptly receiving benefit.
Hunter along with a former Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) colleague Jon Waldron were initially charged in March last year.
Police alleged the pair had accepted financial kickbacks throughout 2013 and 2014 from the former head of ServiceMesh, Eric Pulier, in exchange for awarding the company a $10.5 million deal with CBA.
Kickback Payments
According to a report in «The Australian» (paywall) Hunter had worked to help ServiceMesh by successfully lobbying internally to quickly award it the contracts to the Silicon Valley-based firm.
ServiceMesh has previously provided CBA with cloud computing software services since 2009 that formed part of CBA's core banking modernisation program.
Hunter's kickback payments specifically totalled $630,000. The court today heard that Hunter had been hoping for at least US$1 million.
U.S. Legal Action
CBA dismissed Hunter, an American citizen who joined CBA in 2011 as executive general manager of IT delivery systems, after discovering suspicious payments being made to his CBA account, and his account in New Zealand with Auckland Savings Bank (ASB), which is owned by CBA.
Hunter has also been charged in his home country of the United States with two counts of fraud, which, if found guilty, would see him face a maximum 45 years in prison.
