A Brooklyn jury convicted a former Goldman Sachs banker of paying more than a million dollars to Ghanaian officials for a power plant deal

The Republic of Ghana was in the middle of a national energy crisis when, in December 2014, a Goldman Sachs executive director named Asante Kwako Berko took responsibility for a deal between his bank's client and the Ghanaian state. The client was Aksa Enerji Uretim, a Turkish energy company. The deal was the construction and financing of a power plant that the Justice Department has estimated would generate hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue.

On 6 August 2026, a federal jury in Brooklyn convicted Berko, now 52 and a dual citizen of the United States and Ghana, of conspiracy to violate the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, of violating that Act, and of money laundering conspiracy. He is due to be sentenced on 10 November and faces a maximum of 30 years.

The Justice Department's account, drawn from court documents and evidence heard at trial, is that Berko and his co-conspirators paid and agreed to pay more than one million dollars in bribes to Ghanaian officials at numerous levels of government, to make sure the Turkish company won the bid.

Two of the details are unusually specific. In April 2015, according to prosecutors, Berko and the others discussed paying one million dollars to the Minister of Power, the official responsible for the approvals the project needed to proceed. And during an all expenses paid trip to Turkey, arranged so Ghanaian officials could inspect equipment for the plant, five of those officials each received five thousand dollars.

The Ghanaian parliament ratified the deal in July 2015. Prosecutors told the jury that Berko and his co-conspirators then emailed one another at length about the payments they had made, and that the evidence showed tens of thousands of dollars in bribes Berko had paid personally and was still owed for.

What makes the case unusual among foreign bribery prosecutions is that the bank itself is not the defendant. Berko concealed the scheme from Goldman Sachs as well as from everybody else. He lied to the compliance team responsible for vetting the transaction, and he moved the conversation about bribes onto a personal email account rather than his work one. The money was laundered through shell companies, sham invoices, nominee account holders and cash withdrawals, passing through both American and foreign bank accounts, several of them in Berko's own name. Goldman Sachs ultimately withdrew from the deal over corruption concerns.

The department framed the verdict in competitive terms. Assistant Attorney General A. Tysen Duva of the Criminal Division said the defendant had corrupted fair competition and had abused his position at a world renowned American investment bank to help bribe Ghanaian officials so that he and his co-conspirators, including senior executives at a Turkish company, could make money. Joseph Nocella Jr, the United States Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, called it another significant victory in his office's longstanding commitment to rooting out corruption. Matthew B. Floyd, acting assistant director of the FBI's Criminal Division, said Berko had intentionally lied to his company in order to continue the scheme.

What the verdict does not resolve is the Ghanaian half of it. The officials described in the American indictment were on the receiving end of the payments, and the case that concluded in Brooklyn was brought under United States law against a person the United States could reach. Coverage in Ghana has turned on precisely that gap, and on what the conviction implies for the agreements themselves.

Sentencing is the next fixed date. A federal district judge will determine any sentence after considering the United States Sentencing Guidelines and other statutory factors, so the 30 year maximum is a ceiling rather than a forecast.