The Middlemen

In March 2016, two media outlets — The Age in Australia and The Huffington Post — published the Unaoil Files: hundreds of thousands of leaked internal emails from a small, family-run oil-services consultancy based in Monaco. The company was called Unaoil. The family was the Ahsanis — father Ata, sons Saman and Cyrus. The business they ran, according to the leaks and subsequent prosecutions, was systematic international bribery on behalf of some of the largest engineering and energy corporations in the world.

The model was simple. Multinational companies that wanted contracts in Iraq, Libya, Kazakhstan, and other resource-rich jurisdictions hired Unaoil as a consultant. Unaoil then paid officials in those jurisdictions to award the contracts. The corporations received a polite paper trail of commissions, success fees, and consulting invoices. The officials received cash. The Ahsanis took a cut and maintained the distance that allowed the corporate clients to plausibly deny they knew what they were buying.

What the emails showed

The leaked correspondence did not read like a careful cover-up. It read like the minutes of a functioning business. Specific amounts were discussed. Specific officials were named. The language hovered between professional and transactional — commissions, success fees, government relations support, arrangements for the usual payment — the sort of phrasing that sounds like procurement in an email and like conspiracy in a courtroom.

The corporate client list was not obscure. Rolls-Royce. SBM Offshore, the Dutch-listed oil-services company. Leighton Holdings, the Australian infrastructure firm. Others followed. Blue-chip names, publicly traded, subject to corporate governance frameworks and anti-corruption compliance training. They had, according to the prosecutions that followed, paid a family in Monaco to bribe officials on their behalf for more than a decade.

The cascade

Saman Ahsani, one of the sons, pleaded guilty in the United States in 2019. Conspiracy to violate the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act — the US statute that reaches corporate bribery committed abroad by any entity with a US nexus. Saman cooperated. His cooperation produced a cascade of further prosecutions in the UK and elsewhere.

In London, the Serious Fraud Office brought cases against British executives who had used Unaoil's services. The trials were conducted at Southwark Crown Court. In 2022, several executives were convicted of conspiracy to make corrupt payments. Sentences ranged from two to five years. Rolls-Royce entered a Deferred Prosecution Agreement with the SFO and paid £671 million to avoid prosecution. SBM Offshore settled its US cases for $238 million. In each instance, the corporations paid their way out. The individuals — midlevel executives with no fines to offer — went to prison.

The SFO scandal that nearly unravelled the case

In 2021, news emerged that a senior SFO investigator on the Unaoil case had conducted an unauthorised back-channel with a defence lawyer during the course of the investigation — in effect, passing information that should have remained internal to the prosecution team. The revelation produced an appeals court review, a wave of political pressure on the SFO itself, and genuine questions about whether the entire Unaoil case could stand.

It stood. The convictions were upheld. But the process exposed how fragile international anti-corruption enforcement is. Cases of this size and complexity are built, over years, by small teams of specialist investigators. One back-channel. One rogue investigator. One procedural failing — and the evidentiary edifice wobbles. The Unaoil case survived. The next one may not.

What the Unaoil case tells us

Corruption is not, in the modern European context, about brown envelopes in dark alleys. It is about consulting fees and family firms registered in convenient jurisdictions. It is about compliance departments writing earnest policy statements while the people at the operational end sign contracts with middlemen whose function they understand perfectly well. The Ahsanis were not the disease. They were the symptom. The corporations that hired them knew, in every meaningful sense, what they were paying for.

And the corporations survived. They paid their fines. They issued statements about ethics and compliance. They updated their codes of conduct. The world moved on. The executives who went to prison were the ones too small to pay their way out — which is, quietly, one of the more durable findings of modern European white-collar enforcement. The system punishes individuals. The institutions that housed, rewarded, and protected them continue.

---

Listen to the full story on Courtside Europe, Episode 4. Stream the episode here.