Atlas Air subsidiary Polar Air Cargo, 49% owned by DHL, has apparently been requiring kickbacks for shipments for over a decade. Several of their executives – including the Chief Operating Officer, VP of Operations and VP of Marketing, are now under indictment.

According to the government, if you wanted to ship with Polar you’d have to pay:

1. Shipping rates
   
2. A bribe

The defendants were setting rates and selling cargo space and set up payments to generic-sounding third party vendors in order to accept the bribes.

From in or about 2009 through in or about July 2021, Polar contracted with freight forwarders to sell available cargo space on behalf of downstream shipping customers, who, in turn, paid freight forwarders to secure cargo space and coordinate logistics. … These kickbacks were typically calculated based on how many kilograms of cargo the freight forwarders had shipped with Polar during a particular period. At no point before the discovery of the fraud in or about July 2021 were the kickbacks from freight forwarders known to Polar.

One of Polar’s customers is suing because it was charged bribes. They claimed to have chosen Polar because of low rates, but that initial marketing didn’t include the required bribes. So they were misled by the required add-on fees.

Here’s an email from the Vice President of Marketing, who is under indictment, that included “an eight-page spreadsheet listing dozens of Polar flights, how much cargo Cargo On Demand had on each flight, and how much bribe it owed for each one.”

bro here is the updated sheet — pls use this for distribution

This vendor that’s suing, though, is also indicted for paying he bribes. As national treasure Matt Levin writes, describing the case, the head of the shipping company paying the bribes “thought they were a resort fee!”

Levine points out that one way the scheme was able to go on for so long is because kickbacks weren’t being paid in lump sums, with emails talking about doing the crime. There were detailed invoices based on shipments and sizes being paid monthly via ACH. There’s a lot of documentation about crime. Spreadsheets! But it sure looked business-like.