(Washington) A former US ambassador has pleaded guilty to unlawful lobbying for Qatar and accepting a luxury trip while serving as a diplomat in Pakistan, court documents show.
Posted at 12:28 p.m.
Richard Olson, who also served as ambassador to the United Arab Emirates and special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, was charged in federal court with violating the ban on lobbying for a foreign country in the year following an end of service.
In 2015, while still an ambassador in Islamabad, he met an American-Pakistani man in Los Angeles who offered to work for a business partner in Bahrain.
Richard Olson failed to declare the $19,000 cost of the first-class flight to London and the stay in a luxury hotel for a trip arranged through this unidentified intermediary, the prosecutor said.
He was offered a contract of 300,000 dollars there, for the year following the end of his diplomatic career.
He was asked to help Doha airport obtain the US migration control pre-registration system, to facilitate lucrative connections to the United States.
He would also have been asked to help Qatar in the face of the embargo imposed at the time by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
According to the complaint, a Qatari government official transferred $5.8 million to the Pakistani-American who had approached Richard Olson.