| it looks like the crime is not so much that he accepted bribes but how he did it. For example if a company came and gave him ยง10000 in hand and he reported in on his taxes he would probably be alright but reading the article I can see he was found guilty of multiple cases of money laundering - like you indicated that is against the law not the 'bribe' per se, furthermore he got convicted of fraud - I think because as it says "To facilitate kickback payments, the evidence at trial showed that Kail created and controlled a limited liability corporation called Unix Mercenary, LLC," the DOJ said. "Established on February 7, 2012, Unix Mercenary had no employees and no business location. Kail was the sole signatory to its bank accounts." So basically the company he created was involved in fraudulent activities. There may be other forms of fraud involved here - for example if he said to Netflix I think we should use X because it is the best but he actually wants to use X because he is getting 10000 for it - I could envision a law being written in such a way that it could be interpreted as him defrauding Netflix of 10000 worth of value. on edit: I can also see in the article it says "When an inquiry from the Netflix CEO ensued, Kail falsely denied that he was formally working with Platfora. Kail resigned from his advisory position at Platfora the next week." so he explicitly stated he was not doing something while getting value for doing that thing - that would generally be considered fraudulent. |