Bahrain Mirror: The Panama Papers have revealed how Canadian billionaire and prominent university donor Victor Dahdaleh paid tens of millions of dollars in bribes to Bahraini officials, including a member of the ruling Al Khalifa family, using offshore companies to route the alumina.

Victor Dahdaleh, a Jordan-born businessman who holds both British and Canadian citizenships who was charged with eight counts of corruption, conspiracy and money-laundering in Britain, where he lives, in 2011, is confirmed as the middleman in a 2007 email linking him to companies that helped facilitate a deal for mining giant Alcoa to sell a mineral to officials in Bahrain.

That email was disclosed in the Panama Papers, according to a joint investigation by CBC and The Toronto Star.

U.S. officials say he "enriched himself" with $400 million (U.S.) in mark-ups and paid tens of millions of dollars in bribes to Bahraini officials, the Toronto Star/CBC investigation has found.

U.S. government court records identified "Consultant A" as the "middleman" between Bahraini and U.S. alumina companies pocketing huge profits and paying bribes through a British Virgin Island-based shell company called Alumet Limited.

Isa bin Ali Al Khalifa, member of the ruling Bahraini family, was involved in a series of bribes with Dahdaleh and former agent of American aluminum company Alcoa. In 2013, Dahdaleh admitted paying the then-Chairman of Alba, Sheikh Isa, USD 67 million dollars between 1998 and 2006 in exchange for a reduction in supply of contracts for companies including Alcoa, which were worth over USD 3 billion dollars. His defense said that the payments were part of Bahraini "custom and practice" and were approved by the Prime Minister Sheikh Khalifa bin Salman al-Khalifa, another royal family member.

The scandal forced mining giant Alcoa to plead guilty to paying "millions of dollars in bribes through an international middleman," which is a crime under the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.

The company also paid a historic USD 384 million settlement to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) after it admitted its involvement in a "corruption scheme" that saw at least $110 million paid to Bahraini officials through a then-anonymous consultant.

The Bahrain connection

Court documents show that Alcoa's Australian arm tapped an individual known as "Consultant A" to help it secure a deal to sell alumina, an aluminum-based chemical, to Alba, a Bahraini aluminum-smelting company, beginning in 1989, according to court records obtained by CBC.

In 1993, Alcoa of Australia's sales manager arranged shipments of alumina to Alba through another of Dahdaleh's company's called Kwinalum - a deal that netted $18.7 million between 1993 and 1996, the claim says.

By 1996, with Bahraini demand for alumina growing rapidly, Alumet became a "purported distributor," the DOJ says, allowing Dahdaleh to "impose a significant mark-up on increasing volumes of alumina sales, from which he was able to create an even greater margin on his own purported purchase price."

Alumet's role as an intermediary was valuable for Alcoa, the document says.

Between 1993 and 1996, Dahdaleh made more than $3 million in "corrupt payments" to two Bahraini Royal family officials "from bank accounts at RBC in Guernsey held in the name of shell entities Alumet and ULECO (another of Dahdaleh's companies)."

And business between the Bahraini and Australian companies was growing.

Between 1997 and 2001, Alumet received a mark-up windfall of more than $108 million as the middleman selling to Alba and another $6.2 million in commissions from Alcoa of Australia, the DOJ statement says.

In the same period, Dahdaleh paid $26 million in "corrupt payments" to three Bahraini officials through RBC accounts in Guernsey and Switzerland, the statement says.

Then, by 2002, "Consultant A" had started routing documents related to the Alba deal through Alumet and AAAC, two companies he controlled. The latter company hiked the price of alumina by $79 million from 2002 to 2004.

Consultant A started buying alumina from Alcoa and selling it to Alba in 2005. Price markups netted the companies $188 million up to 2009, but they never actually handled the chemical itself.

The consultant kept some of the money and paid $110 million to officials in Bahrain, including a member of the Middle Eastern kingdom's royal family.

Dahdaleh's relationship with Alumet is confirmed in a 2007 email sent to Mossack Fonseca, the Panamanian law firm at the centre of the Panama Papers.

"This email confirms ... my capacity as the owner and director of Alumet," he wrote.

Dahdaleh registered Alumet in the British Virgin Islands through Royal Bank of Canada (RBC), which has helped to establish approximately 370 offshore companies, according to info contained in the Panama Papers.

Dahdaleh has not been convicted of any offences, his London spokesman Lord Timothy Bell told the Star.

He was acquitted in a separate corruption and money laundering case in the U.K. in 2013, after one witness shifted his testimony and two more refused to testify at all.

Dahdaleh is also known to be close friend of international power players. The self-described metals magnate has rubbed shoulders with the Queen, former U.S. president Bill Clinton and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, noted the Star.