Former Cimic Group Ltd (ASX: CIM) chief operating officer David Savage has been arrested as he exited hotel quarantine in Sydney on Monday.
Australian Federal Police officers detained the 60-year-old over allegations he was involved in a major bribery scandal with Iraqi government officials back when Cimic was called Leighton Holdings.
Savage will face Sydney Central Local Court later on Monday, facing two charges of knowingly providing misleading information.
The high-flying executive was living in France but returned to Australia on 27 December, when a border alert was triggered.
Like all overseas arrivals, he went into mandatory COVID-19 quarantine in a Sydney hotel. When the 2-week period was complete on Monday, police made an immediate arrest.
Another ex-Cimic executive, Russell Waugh, was arrested in November over the same scandal.
The arrests come after a complicated 9-year investigation by the Federal Police, which uncovered about US$77.6 million of "suspicious payments" made to Iraqi Ministry of Oil and the South Oil Company of Iraq officials.
Leighton at the time was trying to win two contracts worth US$1.46 billion.
The police were tipped off in November 2011 about the allegedly criminal payments.
Image source: Australian Federal Police
Most senior execs ever arrested for foreign bribery
Savage and Waugh, according to The Sydney Morning Herald, are the most senior executives from an ASX-listed business to be charged with foreign bribery violations since the law came into being in 1999.
The AFP enquiry resulted in more than 2 million documents seized and harvested evidence from 10 countries.
AFP deputy commissioner Ian McCartney said back in November his team had shown "outstanding resilience over the past 9 years".
"They persevered through the painstaking process of piecing this jigsaw together from facts and allegations of alleged corruption that reached internationally, to a level that allowed us to bring this before the court in Australia."
AFP did not rule out further arrests. A third former Cimic executive, Peter Cox, is also reportedly sought by police but believed to be living in Asia.
Cimic announced to the ASX back in November that it "continues to cooperate with all official investigations".
The Cimic share price is down 1.6% to $25.18 at the time of writing.
