James Koukios

James M Koukios joined the fraud section's Foreign Corrupt Practices Act unit as a trial attorney in June 2009. After being promoted to fraud section senior deputy chief in February 2014, Koukios left DOJ in April 2015 for Morrison & Foerster as a partner in the firm’s securities litigation, enforcement & white-collar defence practice group.

Koukios received his bachelor’s degree from the University of Michigan in 1996 and graduated from Harvard Law School with a law degree cum laude in 1999. After two years clerking for a district court judge in New Orleans, Koukios joined Kirkland & Ellis in Washington, DC, where he worked with his friend and future FCPA unit boss, Chuck Duross.

After several years working as an assistant US attorney in the Southern District of Florida, Koukios moved to the fraud section in 2009. There, he served as senior trial attorney, assistant chief of the FCPA unit, and senior deputy chief of the fraud section.

At the fraud section, Koukios prosecuted former executives of Direct Access Partners accused of bribing a Venezuelan official to direct business to the New York-based brokerage firm.

The case yielded several prosecutions, including the guilty plea of Maria de los Angeles Gonzalez de Hernandez, an official of the Venezuelan state-owned bank Bandes who admitted to accepting bribes.

As a fraud section trial attorney, Koukios successfully prosecuted a multi-defendant FCPA case involving bribes paid to Haitian officials to secure telecommunications contracts. Among the people and companies charged were Cinergy Telecommunications, Terra Telecommunications, and Haitian government officials for bribes paid to Haiti’s state-run telecoms company, Telecommunications D'Haiti.

Before joining Morrison & Foerster, Koukios also spent three years as a professor at Georgetown University Law Center.