Amanda Aikman
Amanda Aikman is a former Foreign Corrupt Practices Act unit prosecutor now working as an associate for Morrison & Foerster in New York.
She joined the department as a trial attorney in 2008 through the Attorney General’s Honors Program – the only way newly qualified lawyers can start at the DOJ.
As a fraud section trial attorney, Aikman, a 2008 graduate of Yale Law School, was assigned a junior role in the Gabon "sting" case in 2011, after the high-profile 22-defendant FCPA case ran into trouble.
US District Court Judge Richard Leon ordered a mistrial in the case in July 2011 after the jury failed to reach a verdict on a first batch of defendants. The government vowed to retry those defendants, but before it could do so, it failed to win convictions in December 2011 after a trial of a second group of defendants.
The defendants were military and law enforcement products brokers accused of conspiring to pay bribes for military supply contracts in Gabon. An undercover FBI agent pretended to be an agent of the Gabonese defence minister.
Aikman presented the government's case in court when defendant Jonathan Spiller, former CEO of Armor Holdings, agreed to plead guilty and cooperate with the government. But she did not play at role in court at either trial.
Aikman, who attended Stanford University as an undergraduate, was involved with other FCPA matters.
She prosecuted Comverse Technology, which agreed to a US$2.8 million settlement over bribes allegedly paid to a state-run telecom provider in Greece.
She also assisted in the prosecution of Latin Node, a Miami-based telecommunications firm, on FCPA conspiracy charges for bribes paid to Honduran government officials in exchange for contracts from the state-owned telecom authority. Former CEO Jorge Granados and vice president Manuel Caceres pleaded guilty to the charges in May 2011. Aikman presented the government's case at their plea hearings.
Aikman left the fraud section in January 2012 for Geneva, Switzerland, where she became the Robina Foundation Human Rights Fellow at the International Labour Organisation.
While overseas, she assisted then-FCPA unit chief Charles Duross in the writing of the DOJ's "A Resource Guide to the US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act", released in November 2012.
She joined Morrisson & Foerster's New York office in February 2015 as an associate assisting Washington, DC-based Duross, who now heads the firm's global anti-corruption practice.