Adam Safwat

Adam Safwat was a deputy chief in the criminal division's fraud section, which he joined in 2006 from the US Attorney's office in Delaware. He handled securities cases as well as the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.

Safwat joined Weil Gotshal & Manges in 2014 as counsel, where he advises clients on internal investigations and white-collar defence.

In 2010, Safwat joined the FCPA prosecution team headed by Stacey Luck for the US bribery probe of Swiss freight company Panalpina World Transport (Holding) and its customers. In November 2010, Panalpina and six of its customers in the oil and gas industry agreed to pay US$236.5 million total to settle the wide-ranging foreign bribery investigations by the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Justice Department. Safwat was part of the prosecution team that awarded Panalpina customers significant credit for early self-reporting of bribery violations to the Justice Department.

Safwat also handled the cases of two executives who were investigated for their roles in a fraudulent scheme to manipulate the financial statements of AIG, the insurance company that nearly collapsed in 2008 during the economic meltdown. Safwat won convictions against Christian M Milton, a former senior executive at AIG, who was sentenced to four years in prison; and Christopher P Garand, a former senior executive with General Reinsurance Corporation (General Re), who received a term of more than a year in prison. The resolution included an agreement between General Re and the Justice Department to resolve allegations related to the manipulation of AIG’s financial statements.

In 2011, Safwat signed a request for a stay in a US$31 million federal civil suit filed in Houston by Aluminium Bahrain BSC (Alba) against Japanese commodities trader Sojitz Group and its US subsidiary for allegedly paying US$15 million in bribes for metals-market discounts. In the request, Safwat cited the DOJ’s own Foreign Corrupt Practices Act probe.

In November 2011, Safwat told US District Judge Donetta Ambrose in Pittsburgh that the three-and-a half-year Alcoa probe was nearing an end and described the department's work on the case.

Safwat served as the department's lead attorney on a filter team that oversaw discovery production to defense counsel of voluminous materials in the FCPA "Gabon sting" case, according to a 2011 article in the National Law Journal. Twenty two military and law enforcement products brokers were charged with agreeing to pay bribes to the minister of defense of Gabon in exchange for contracts. The operation was a sting set up by the FBI; no actual Gabonese officials were involved. After two trials, however, the Justice Department failed to win any convictions in the sting case, and US District Judge Richard Leon in Washington, DC, ended up dismissing all the charges, as well as the previous guilty pleas of three defendants, in 2012.

Safwat holds degrees from the University of California at Berkeley and Duke University School of Law. After law school, he clerked for US Court of Appeals Judge Walter K Stapleton of the Third Circuit, then became an associate at Cravath Swaine & Moore in New York and later Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati in Palo Alto, California. He was an assistant US attorney in Delaware from September 2002 until June 2006.