Malaysian national Leonard Glenn Francis was returned to the United States in 2023 after he cut off his GPS monitor and fled to Venezuela.

A former defense contractor has been sentenced to 15 years in prison in the United States, prosecutors said, for being behind one of the biggest scandals in the military involving bribes to dozens of US Navy officers.

Leonard Glenn Francis was sentenced in federal court in San Diego and ordered to pay $20 million in restitution to the Navy, along with a $150,000 fine, according to a statement from the U.S. Attorney’s Office on Tuesday.

Additionally, U.S. District Judge Janis L. Sammartino ordered Malaysian citizen Francis, also known as “Fat Leonard” because of his large stature, to forfeit $35 million in “ill-gotten proceeds of his crimes.”

Prosecutors said the sentence was the result of Francisco’s first guilty plea in 2015 to bribery and fraud, his extensive cooperation with the government since then and another guilty plea Tuesday for failing to appear at his original sentencing hearing in 2022. .

Shortly before his sentencing in September 2022, Francisco cut off a GPS ankle monitor he was wearing while under house arrest and fled the country. He was under house arrest after being hospitalized and treated for kidney cancer and other medical problems.

He began an international search after fleeing to Mexico before reaching Cuba and eventually arriving in Venezuela.

He was arrested by Venezuelan authorities about two weeks after he disappeared while trying to board a flight at the Simón Bolívar international airport on the outskirts of the capital, Caracas.

Venezuelan officials said he intended to reach Russia. They brought him back to the United States in December 2023.

Leonard Glenn Francis sentenced to 15 years in prison for massive bribery, fraud and disappearance pic.twitter.com/gxdv3tjs1b

— United States Attorney CAS (@SDCAnews) November 5, 2024

Francis, 60, has about eight and a half years left in prison since he was initially arrested in San Diego in 2013 and remained in protective custody until late 2017, when a court released him pending sentencing on medical grounds. .

According to prosecutors, Francis and his company, Glenn Defense Marine Asia (GDMA), which served US Navy ships in ports in Asia Pacific, gave co-conspirators millions of dollars in valuables, including more than $500,000 in cash.

He also spent hundreds of thousands of dollars bribing officials with sex parties, travel expenses, hotel stays, spa treatments, lavish meals, premium alcohol and wine, and luxury gifts that included Kobe beef, Cuban cigars, and ornamental swords.

Prosecutors said Francis admitted that, in return, Navy personnel defended his and GDMA’s name during the procurement process, providing classified information about port visits by several Navy ships and competitors’ bids for contracts. naval.

GDMA was also ordered to pay a fine of $36 million.

The cases were handled by the Federal Prosecutor’s Office in an effort to be independent of the military justice system.

But what Sammartino last year called “egregious misconduct” by the lead federal prosecutor in the cases of four former Navy officers involved with Francisco led to the military officers’ felony convictions being overturned.

Sammartino, however, ruled that the misconduct was not enough to dismiss the large-scale bribery and fraud case.