Justice finally caught up with the U.S. subsidiary of Lend Lease Construction, an Australian firm, over a 10-year overbilling fraud. A U.S. court in Brooklyn fined the company $58 million in fines and restitution to victims.

The penalty was imposed after the company, previously known as Bovis Lend Lease, pleaded guilty to criminal charges after it admitted that it billed clients, mostl of them government agencies, for hours of employees that were never worked from 1999 to 2009.

The former head of Land Lease's New York office, James Abadie, filed the guilty plea on Tuesday to the charges of conspiracy to commit mail and wire fraud. He faces up to 20 years in prison. The hefty fine is part of the deferred prosecution agreement the court made public on Tuesday.

It includes Land Lease accepting responsibility for its fraud, cooperating with investigators and putting in place internal controls to prevent future misconduct.

FBI Assistant Director in Charge Janice Fedarcyk said in a statement the proceedings is the result of a three-year probe in what she described as "a systematic pattern of audacious fraud by one of the world's largest construction firms."

Robert McNamara, the chief executive of Lend Lease in the U.S., committed to the highest level of ethical standards for the Australian firm.

"We accept responsibility for what happened in the past and have agreed to continue to make restitution to the affected clients," he told The Sydney Morning Herald.

The fines are broken into $40.5 million penalties, and $13.6 million and $2.5 million restitution to the different victims of its schemes.

Land Lease owns one of the largest offices in New York City and employs more than 1,000 people. Among its projects were the September 11 Memorial and the Mets' Citi Field baseball stadium. The criminal charges filed in the Brooklyn court stemmed from construction projects including a criminal court building in the Bronx and the Brooklyn federal courthouse. Land Lease regularly added up to two hours of overtime, which were unworked, to timesheets of labour foremen and charged its clients for weeks even when the supervisors were on leave or ill.

Another crime by Land Lease was to fool the states of New York and New Jersey to believe that it met the requirements of programmes that aimed to boost the participation of small construction firms and those owned by women on minorities on public construction projects, even if it did not. The firm, for instance, certified a minority hiring unit to have performed 100 per cent general contract work on the Bronx Criminal Courthouse but most of its workers were directly managed by the union.

The firm assured the court that it has ousted the officials and staff who were responsible for the deeds, or cut their responsibilities.

The court allowed Land Lease to avoid criminal prosecution because it cooperated extensively in the investigation.

"We are satisfied that the investigation is now resolved and we are looking forward to continuing our commitment to projects in New York City," McNamara added.

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