Bulgarian oil trader Liudmil Dionisiev received a suspended two-year term in jail, Reuters newswire reported on Friday. He was found to have surreptitiously giving out bribes to Iraqi officials within the Oil for Food programme of the United Nations.

A federal court gave out the sentence after Dionisiev pleaded guilty in August on contraband, an item on the bill of indictment. Dionisiev made the confession weeks before facing court alongside the Texas oil magnate Oscar Wyatt.

According to the bill of indictment, Dionisiev, 61, in his capacity as consultant of Texas citizen David Chalmers aided in the purchase of Iraqi oil for his companies Bayoil USA and Bayoil Supply & Trading. Under one of the deals in January 2001, Dionisiev was proven to have communicated to Russian politician Vladimir Zhirinovsky that one of Chalmers' companies would pay Iraq more than $546 000 (376 669 euro) for the supply of 1.82 million barrels of oil.

“This was the biggest mistake in my life,” Dionisiev was quoted by Reuters as saying minutes after the court issued its verdict.
The court levied a $5000 (3 450 euro) fine on Dionisiev.

When the row broke out in January 2004, Iraqi newspaper Al Mada published a list with 200 companies, organisations, parties and physical persons alleged of to have been giving out bribes. Among the institutions featuring in the list was the Bulgarian Socialist Party (BSP). Then Bulgarian President Georgi Purvanov and then-BSP leader Sergei Stanishev denied allegations that the party had been financed through oil supplies by Saddam Hussein. The two then announced they would investigate the claims of Al Mada that in 1998 the persons featuring in the list received “gifts” from the former Iraqi dictator in return for support of his government.