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NEW YORK — America's special Middle East envoy testified Friday that he still trusts a Connecticut businessman and considers him his friend despite losing $200,000 in an investment that resulted in his friend being charged with helping to bribe government officials in Azerbaijan.
George Mitchell, the former Democratic Senate majority leader, said at the end of three hours of testimony that he still trusts Frederic Bourke, who is accused of conspiring with others to corrupt the oil privatization process in Azerbaijan.
Mitchell, 75, was called as a witness by Bourke's lawyers at a trial that is in its third week in U.S. District Court in Manhattan. If Bourke, of Greenwich, Conn., is convicted, he could face up to 30 years in prison.
Mitchell said he invested $200,000 in Bourke's company in 1998 and then largely forgot about it because he was in Northern Ireland from 1996 to 1999 trying to broker a peace deal. Bourke's offshore company invested in another company that invested in Azerbaijan.
"So this was something that I paid little or no attention to," he testified. "This was a part of my life that was really not on my radar screen."
Mitchell, the Senate majority leader from 1989 to 1995, said he never saw most of the documents about the business that were sent to his office in the United States.
"I was completely occupied," he said.
The former senior senator from Maine said he sent the $200,000 check without researching the investment.
"It was not my life savings but it was a significant amount of money and still is," he said. "I trusted him personally and I trusted his personal judgment."
Mitchell said he had not been asked to invest in business ventures before because Bourke "knew I was in the United States Senate and didn't have anything to invest," a comment that prompted laughter in the courtroom.
At the end of his testimony, Mitchell was asked by Assistant U.S. Attorney Harry Chernoff if he still trusted Bourke enough that he would again invest $200,000 with him in a business venture.
"Since then I've hired a financial adviser," he said with a chuckle, setting off more laughter among jurors and spectators. "I now place all my trust in him. Now it's the same situation but a different person."
Under Chernoff's earlier questioning, Mitchell testified that he regretted making the investment.
Bourke was charged in 2005 with conspiring to violate the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and the Travel Act by offering hundreds of millions of dollars to top officials in Azerbaijan in exchange for favorable treatment in oil deals.
The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act makes it a crime to offer payment to foreign government officials to obtain or retain business. Besides cash, the defendants also provided jewelry and luxury items and free medical treatment to the officials, prosecutors said.
Azerbaijan, rich in oil resources, began privatizing some of its state-owned enterprises in the 1990s.
Prosecutors say Bourke and others tried to corrupt the privatization process by bribing key decision makers from the former Soviet republic from 1997 to 1999.
Mitchell testified that he knew nothing of bribes and resigned from a position as a director on the boards of Bourke's companies as soon as he was told in January 1999 that there were fraud allegations involving Viktor Kozeny.
Kozeny, an Irish citizen of Czech background, was president and chairman of Oily Rock Group Limited and Minaret Group Limited. He remains free and has successfully fought efforts to extradite him from the Bahamas to face U.S. criminal charges in the case.
