To his north London clientele, Jeffrey Tesler was just a high-street solicitor with a penchant for wearing brown fedora hats. Few people who passed his shabby-looking offices bothered to take a second look.
But from behind this suburban façade, the 60-year-old lawyer has emerged as a key player in a £100m bribery scandal which spans three continents and implicates an American corporate giant once run by the former vice-president Dick Cheney.
The first Mr Tesler's neighbours knew there was anything more to his business dealings than conveyancing and will-writing was when Scotland Yard detectives and investigators from the Serious Fraud Office (SFO) raided his offices in Tottenham, north London, on Thursday afternoon.
Mr Tesler, a joint British and Israeli passport holder, is being held on strict bail conditions awaiting extradition to America where he is charged with bribing Nigerian government officials to win a lucrative natural gas construction contract for Halliburton, when Mr Cheney was chief executive of the company.
Another British man, Wojciech Chodan, 71, from Maidenhead, has also been charged with bribery offences and is still being sought by the authorities.
At the heart of the allegations are £3.5bn-worth of contracts to build a gas-production plant in Nigeria. Mr Tesler's arrest is the latest development in a 10-year investigation in which US and British anti-fraud officers have been to Lagos, Texas, Geneva and Gibraltar in search of evidence.
How the solicitor became involved in such a massive project is not entirely clear. But since Mr Tesler first passed his law degree in 1970 and then took his articles at the Linklaters & Paines law firm, he became increasingly involved in other enterprises.
After leaving Linklaters in the Seventies he worked for a range of mid-tier solicitors before joining the north London practice, Kaye Tesler.
In 1995 he was hired as an "agent" of a four-company consortium that was awarded four engineering, procurement and construction contracts by Nigeria Liquefied Natural Gas Ltd (NLNG) to build the gas facility on Bonny Island in the Niger Delta.
According to the US indictment, Mr Chodan was a former salesperson and consultant of a UK subsidiary of Kellogg, Brown & Root (KBR), one of the four joint venture companies. KBR, a major engineering and construction company, was formerly part of Halliburton, which was controlled by Mr Cheney until he became Vice-President in 2000.
The US prosecutors say that at "cultural meetings", Mr Chodan and other co-conspirators allegedly discussed using Mr Tesler and other agents to pay bribes to Nigerian government officials to secure support for awarding the contracts to the joint venture.
It is alleged that the consortium paid Mr Tesler $132m (£94m) with which he was to bribe the Nigerian officials. Through his Gibraltar-based company, Mr Tesler allegedly wired the money to various Nigerian government officials as well as those working for NLNG, the company in charge of the project.
If found guilty, Mr Tesler and Mr Chodan face up to 55 years in a Texan prison. The US government is also seeking forfeiture of $130m from both men.
After his arrest, Mr Tesler was held over night at a London police station before appearing before City of Westminster magistrates where he surrendered his Israeli passport and provided a £500,000 surety.
Questions have also been raised about the use of British taxpayers' money to underwrite part of the £3bn project. The Export Credits Guarantee Department (ECGD), the Whitehall agency used to insure British business abroad, agreed to a request by a British consultancy, M W Kellogg, 55 per cent-owned by KBR, to underwrite a bank loan.
The £120m loan made by the French bank BNP Paribas was paid to the Bonny Island project company. MPs claimed the ECGD should have investigated the project more closely before agreeing to secure the loan. An ECGD spokesman said it was not an "investigatory agency" and had only underwritten a small part of the project.
"We will of course ask questions where we need to and when there is something that requires investigation we will alert the appropriate investigatory authority, usually the SFO," said the spokesman.
The SFO said the US charges against Mr Tesler and Mr Chodan had not ended its investigation.
Criminal Investigation of Halliburton's Nigerian Operation - video powered by Metacafe
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