A government official from the Federated States of Micronesia is scheduled to plead guilty in U.S. District Court next month to conspiring to launder bribe money he solicited from a Honolulu engineering contractor.
Master Halbert is assistant secretary and safety inspector of FSM’s Division of Civil Aviation. His lawyer Myles Breiner said Halbert is on an unpaid leave of absence from his job pending the outcome of his criminal case.
Halbert has been off the job since his arrest last month in Honolulu.
According to a charging document federal prosecutors filed last week, it was in his capacity as an official in the FSM Department of Transportation, Communications and Infrastructure that Halbert solicited and accepted bribes between 2006 and 2016 from Frank James Lyon, president and owner of Lyon Associates Inc., to secure $7.8 million in government contracts for the Honolulu civil engineering company.
Halbert is scheduled to plead guilty April 2. He is free on an unsecured $25,000 signature bond cosigned by his wife, but is restricted to Oahu. His wife’s family owns a condominium in Makiki.
His wife is the daughter of Peter M. Christian, the outgoing FSM president. Christian failed to retain his at-large senatorial seat in the FSM parliamentary elections earlier this month. The congress selects the president and vice president from the FSM’s four at-large senators.
Breiner says Christian lost the election in large part because of the scandal involving his son-in-law.
Lyon pleaded guilty in January to conspiring to bribe an agent of an organization that receives federal money and admitted to paying approximately $200,000 in bribes to Halbert in the form of cash, travel expenses, vehicles and college tuition for a relative.
He also admitted making cash payments of at least $240,000 to an unnamed employee of a Hawaii state agency to secure a $2.5 million contract from the unidentified agency.
The city said Lyon resigned from his appointed position on the Honolulu Zoning Board of Appeals on the same day he pleaded guilty.
