Ex-Air Force Official Admits Favors For Boeing A former high-ranking Air Force procurement official, Darleen A. Druyun, was sentenced to nine months in prison after she admitted awarding sweetheart deals to Boeing Co., where she later went to work. Druyun pleaded guilty in April to conspiracy to violate conflict-of-interest laws, but said at the time that she never did any special favors for Boeing. She later failed a polygraph test and acknowledged favorable treatment for the aircraft maker on billions of dollars’ worth of contracts, according to documents filed with U.S. District Court in Alexandria, VA, when she was sentenced Oct. 1. In her guilty plea, Druyun admitted she was negotiating for a $250,000-a-year job with Boeing at the same time she was supervising the Air Force’s negotiations over a $23 billion tanker lease deal with the company. Boeing fired her and the company’s chief financial officer, Michael Sears, and its CEO, Philip Condit, resigned. Published reports said Sears had agreed to plead guilty, but the agreement was put on hold after Druyun’s confession triggered a wider investigation. Under questioning by federal agents in July, Druyun acknowledged she had lied about doing favors for Boeing while she was the principal deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force for acquisition and management. According to court documents, she said she agreed to a higher price for the tanker leases “than she believed was appropriate.” She called it “a parting gift to Boeing,” since she was about to retire from the Air Force and was negotiating for a job with the company. The Defense Department inspector general is investigating the lease deal. It has not yet been signed. Druyun admitted she contacted Boeing executives about jobs for her daughter and future son-in-law in 2000; both were hired by the company. Around that time she negotiated a $412 million payment to Boeing to settle a dispute over a contract for C-17 transport aircraft. In 2001 she awarded a $4 billion contract for aircraft avionics to Boeing over four other bidders, because she felt she owed the company for hiring her daughter and the daughter’s fiancé. “The defendant believes that an objective selection authority may not have selected Boeing,” the court document states. In 2002 she negotiated a $100 million payment to Boeing under a NATO contract, although she believed the payment was too high. She acknowledged she was influenced by her daughter and son-in-law’s employment with the company and by her own job negotiations. At around the same time, Druyun said, she contacted Boeing executives because her daughter feared she was about to be fired; the daughter was transferred to another job at the company. Her revelations could lead to new DOD scrutiny of those contracts, but knowledgeable lawyers do not expect the department to cancel and re-compete any of them, because work is already well along, The Wall Street Journal reported. Druyun will serve nine months in prison followed by seven months of confinement either in a halfway house or home detention. Under federal sentencing guidelines she could have been sentenced to 16 months in prison, the U.S. attorney’s office said. Before she was sentenced by Judge T.S. Ellis III, Druyun tearfully apologized and said she felt “deep shame.”