Patrick Stokes

In March 2016, Patrick Stokes was promoted from head of the FCPA unit to senior deputy chief within the Justice Department criminal division's fraud section, removing him from direct supervision of foreign bribery cases as he looked to move to the private sector. Just Anti-Corruption has since reported that he will be moving to Gibson Dunn & Crutcher.

One of his deputies, Dan Kahn, was named acting head of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act unit.

Stokes was the lead prosecutor at trial in the foreign bribery case against former PetroTiger co-CEO Joseph Sigelman. 

Sigelman was originally charged in a six-count indictment in 2014 of bribing an official at Colombia’s national oil company, Ecopetrol, while two of his co-conspirators accepted plea deals with the DOJ over the matter. But only a week into the scheduled six-week trial in June 2015, the DOJ's case unravelled after Sigelman's defence team highlighted inconsistencies in the testimony of a key government witness.

Although Sigelman pleaded guilty to one count of conspiring to violate the FCPA, many commentators saw the outcome as a failure for the DOJ. 

Stokes succeeded Charles Duross as head of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act unit in January 2014.

He had previously been co-leader of the fraud section's securities and financial fraud unit, created in 2012 with the merger of the financial institutions and public sector fraud unit and the corporate, securities and commodities fraud unit.

At the securities unit, Stokes helped lead the successful 2011 prosecution of Lee Bentley Farkas, the former chairman of mortgage lender Taylor Bean & Whitaker. After a 10-day trial in Alexandria, Virginia, a jury found Farkas guilty in a US$2.9 billion fraud scheme that contributed to the failures of both Taylor Bean and Colonial Bank, one of the 25 largest banks in the US in 2009. Stokes was on a team honoured for the Farkas prosecution, winning the Attorney General's Award for Distinguished Service.

Earlier in his career, Stokes worked with then-assistant chief of the fraud section William Stuckwisch on the complicated prosecution of a consortium of companies including KBR that admitted to participating in a scheme to bribe Nigerian officials for contracts to build a liquefied natural gas facility at Bonny Island, Nigeria.