Corruption’s Long Tentacles: Egypt meets New Jersey in Certification-Monopoly Bribery Scheme

By AAF Staff

The federal corruption indictment of New Jersey Senator Bob Menendez today came as a shock to many, but perhaps should not have been wholly unexpected: after all, Sen. Menendez had been indicted and tried before for similar ‘influence-peddling’ wrongdoing (regarding a criminal Florida doctor), in a case that ended up with a hung jury and a dismissal in 2017. Apparently, this ‘victory’ of sorts emboldened Bobby, as the latest allegations appear to show that he has not learned his lesson that “bribery is bad”…

The new charges, however, are truly peculiar and interesting: they involve (alleged) international bribery (using gold bars and fancy cars) by and on behalf of Egyptian interests in the United States and abroad, as well as a state-sanctioned monopoly that was “detrimental to U.S. interests,” yet advocated-for by Mr. Menendez.

The defendants in this case — Menendez, his wife Nadine, and three “New Jersey business associates” of theirs: Wael Hana, Jose Uribe and convicted loan-scammer Fred Daibes with alleged mob ties — are said to have benefited from the scheme directly, as well as the government of Egypt.

Menendez in particular is accused of influencing POTUS’ selection of the U.S. Attorney for New Jersey (so as to ‘go easy’ on one of his accomplices) and, bizarrely, seeking to pressure the Department of Agriculture to not interfere with an unlawful monopoly Mr. Hana had tried to import into the U.S. market from Egypt. Hana owns NJ-based company “IS EG Halal Certified”, located in Daibes’ neighborhood of Edgewater, NJ.

How did the strange “Egyptian Monopolization Scam” work? Back in 2019, the Department of Agriculture informed the Arab Republic of Egypt that it would object to its sanctioning of giving Mr. Hana (Mr. Menendez’s ‘business associate’) monopoly rights related to certifying “halal” meat from the United States exported to Egypt. It was essentially a ‘certification’ monopoly, similar to “organic” or “kosher” food, “non-conflict diamonds,” etc. — and the good folks over in D.C. at Agriculture found Wael’s dominant position in this market “detrimental to U.S. interests,” noting in particular that the award to Wael Hana made no economic sense as “neither HANA nor his company had experience with halal certification.”

This is where the NJ Senator comes in…

48 hours after Bobby and Wael met in the senator’s office in D.C. in May 2019 (and subsequently snacked on — likely non-halal — steak at a fancy restaurant in the nation’s capital, together with an Egyptian intelligence official), the senator allegedly “made a call” to an AG Dept. official, intervening on behalf of his steak-house friend and instructing the rank-and-file department personnel to cease opposing Hana’s monopoly position, “dropping the Egypt thing”. Wael then used the “monopoly rents” obtained from his export-cert business to fund Bob’s bribes and pay a $30,000 salary and $23,000 of her late mortgage payments to Bob’s wife, according to the Jersey grand jury’s indictment.

As a post-scriptum to this sordid global bribery story, we note that the FBI agents who raided Mr. Menendez’s home and his wife’s safe-deposit boxes only found less than $1m worth of cash, gold bars, and a Mercedes. That seems almost “cheap”, given that the global market for halal food is estimated to exceed $2 trillion. (More in-depth reading on halal cert here for those interested.)

So perhaps Bobby was the one being cheated here…? Let us know your thoughts.