Chi Ping Patrick Ho, a citizen of the People’s Republic of China, has been sentenced in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York to 36 months in prison in connection with his conviction for bribing government officials in Chad and Uganda. Ho served as secretary-general of the China Energy Fund Committee (CEFC NGO), an NGO based in Arlington, Virginia and Hong Kong, that was funded by CEFC China Energy Company Limited (CEFC), an oil, gas and banking conglomerate headquartered in Shanghai.
In December 2018, Ho was convicted in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York for violations of the FCPA, as well as money laundering and conspiracy to commit money laundering. In announcing Ho’s conviction, the Department of Justice stated that according to the evidence presented at trial, between 2014 and 2016 Ho attempted to pay $2 million to Idriss Déby, the president of Chad, and wired $500,000 to the Foreign Minister of Uganda through a purported charitable organization in order to obtain business advantages for CEFC in those countries.
In addition to the three year prison sentence, Ho was fined $400,000.