A high-ranking federal agency employee will spend the next six months in his home for accepting nearly $135,000 from his best friend to help the friend get a $4.5 million government contract.
David Anthony Sequeira’s sentence will allow the former Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation telecommunications section supervisor to find work so that he can care for his 19-year-old daughter, who has cancer. U.S. District Judge Claude Hilton’s sentencing order issued in Alexandria’s federal court allows Sequeira to leave his Arlington home for work.
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Sequeira supervised the FDIC’s telecommunication section from 1998 to 2005. He resigned from the agency in August. In July, his childhood friend Irving Rodriguez pleaded guilty to transferring $134,926 to Sequeira’s niece’s bank account so Sequeira would use his position to approve a $4.5 million telecommunications contract for Rodriguez’s Arlington-based company, Avalon Technology Inc. The contract was to provide secure communication lines for use by federal bank examiners while in the field.
Sequeira admitted to receiving the cash in his December guilty plea. Rodriguez was sentenced to four months of home detention and ordered to pay a $5,000 fine.
According to court documents, Sequeira already has three job offers from technology companies, which he would have lost had Hilton agreed with prosecutors who asked that Sequeira receive a two-year prison sentence.
The loss of a job prospect would have left Sequeira without the income his lawyer says his family needs to prepare for the day when Sequeira’s daughter turns 25 and will no longer be covered by her parents’ insurance, Sequeira’s attorney, James Rodio, wrote in court documents. The 19-year-old was diagnosed with a rare form of cancer when she was 13. Dozens of surgeries and several stretches of chemotherapy have left the young woman in poor physical condition, and the cancer is still coursing through her body. There’s no known cure and she’ll suffer from the ailment the rest of her life, doctors have reportedly told the family.
“Given his concerns about taking care of his family, there is no likelihood that such conduct will ever recur,” Rodio wrote. “Home detention will permit him to be productive not only for his family but also for society.”
