Federal employee Ifediora Oli, 41, was busted this morning at his Maryland home for allegedly conniving to rip off DC to fatten his own pockets, a complaint unsealed today in the nation's capital revealed. According to the U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Columbia, Oli was charged with conspiracy to defraud the District, involving money, property and denying the city honest services.
The Silver Spring resident, who doubles as the principal for Highbury Global Group, Inc. had been in cahoots with former and current Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA) employees, said the feds. As per court documents, starting in 2018, a WMATA insider identified as Co-conspirator No. 1 started pushing contracts Oli's way. Co-conspirator No. 2, another WMATA player who switched to working with the District's Office of Contracting and Procurement in 2019, also joined in on the scheme, steering a lucrative COVID-19 contract to Oli's company.
The duplicitous deal for COVID-19 testing supplies, cut with Highbury on behalf of the District's Department of Forensic Sciences, was pinned down by February 2021. DC government ended up wiring over $630,000 to Highbury's accounts. But it didn't stop there; Oli, presumably as a token of gratitude, transferred over $140,000 to Co-conspirator No. 1's bank account, who then turned around and passed $15,000 in cold cash to Co-conspirator No. 2, the complaint alleges.
The sinister plot was exposed by a combined investigation spearheaded by the FBI’s Washington Field Office, alongside the WMATA Office of the Inspector General and the DC Office of the Inspector General. Quoted from the Justice Department announcement, U.S. Attorney Matthew M. Graves stated that "the arrest reflects the shared commitment of the U.S. Attorney’s Office and our law enforcement partners to root out corruption that undermines the integrity of the government institutions serving the people of the District of Columbia." Assistant U.S. Attorney Timothy Visser is set to lead the prosecution of the knotty affair.
