The Department of Justice announced a guilty plea in a Foreign Corrupt Practices Act case today.

Joseph T. Lukas, 60, a resident of New Jersey, was a partner in Nexus Technologies Inc. until 2005. According to court documents, Nexus Technologies Inc. was a privately owned export company that identified U.S. vendors for contracts opened for bid by the Vietnamese government to purchase a wide variety of equipment and technology, including underwater mapping equipment, bomb containment equipment, helicopter parts, chemical detectors, satellite communication parts and air tracking systems. Lukas was responsible for overseeing the negotiation of contracts with suppliers in the United States.

In connection with his guilty plea, Lukas admitted that from 1999 to 2005, he and other employees of Nexus Technologies Inc. agreed to pay, and knowingly paid, bribes to Vietnamese government officials in exchange for contracts with the agencies for which the officials worked. The bribes were falsely described as “commissions” in the company’s records.