Situation
Something was wrong inside Toshiba International Corporation's facilities operations. Construction contracts were being awarded in ways that did not add up, and the dollars at stake were large. When the firm dug in, the picture that emerged was stark: the company's own facilities manager had been steering more than $100 million in construction work to two favored companies in exchange for bribes paid in cash, gold and silver bars, real estate, guns, jewelry, and watches, and the resulting losses to Toshiba ran past $80 million.
The scheme was not subtle once it was traced. The payments to the facilities manager came in cash, in silver bars, and in real estate. A company that believed it was buying construction services at arm's length had instead been funding a long-running fraud carried out by a trusted insider working hand in hand with outside contractors.
Approach
Daniel Fridman led an internal investigation that reconstructed how the bid-rigging worked, who benefited, and how the money moved. The work mapped the relationship between the facilities manager and the two construction companies and documented the bribes well enough to support litigation.
On those findings, the firm filed a civil RICO suit in Houston in October 2019. But the more consequential decision was to take the evidence to the government. The firm represented Toshiba as the victim in the criminal prosecutions that followed, with Fridman presenting the assembled evidence to the U.S. Attorney's Office and later delivering Toshiba's victim impact statement to the court.
The engagement carried its own marker of client confidence. The investigation had begun while Fridman was at his prior firm; Toshiba chose to keep him on the matter after he founded Fridman Fels & Soto.
Result
The perpetrators were prosecuted, pled guilty, and were sentenced to prison. One of the business owners received a nine-year sentence in the Southern District of Texas.
For Toshiba, the outcome turned a costly internal fraud into a documented criminal accountability, achieved by combining a private investigation, civil litigation, and a coordinated presentation to federal prosecutors.