Statoil took "responsibility for bribery" and agreed it had "improperly" accounted for the payments in its books, the company said today in a statement on the Oslo exchange. Statoil had "insufficient internal controls," it said.

Statoil's penalty is among the largest ever imposed by the U.S. for violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, a law aimed at preventing companies from paying bribes to win business overseas. Investigations into Statoil's practices caused the resignations of several top officials, including the chief executive officer, in 2003.

The company made "payments to an Iranian official in 2002 and 2003 in order to induce him to use his influence to obtain the award to Statoil of a contract to develop phases 6, 7 and 8 of the Iranian South Pars gas field," the statement said.

The admission settles a two-year investigation of the state-controlled Norwegian company by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and the U.S. Department of Justice. U.S. authorities had since 2004 investigated whether the Stavanger, Norway-based Statoil bribed a consultant in Iran to win business.

Statoil agreed to pay a fine of $10.5 million to the Justice Department and a penalty of $10.5 million to the SEC. A fine the company paid to Norwegian authorities will be subtracted from the U.S. bill, leaving Statoil a balance of $18 million.

Statoil was fined 20 million kroner ($3 million) by Norway in June 2004 after a nine-month probe of allegations the company used a contract with Horton Investment to bribe Iranian officials. Statoil paid a middleman to seek to influence Iranian decision makers and gain drilling rights.

Investigators said they found no evidence the contract helped Statoil win influence. Two years earlier, Statoil became operator of parts of Iran's South Pars project, the world's biggest natural-gas field without oil. The company opened an office in Tehran in 2001.

Statoil has said it received advice from Mehdi Hashemi Rafsanjani, the head of a unit of state-run National Iranian Oil Co., under the consulting contract with Horton Investment, a company owned by an Iranian named Abbas Yazdi. Rafsanjani is the son of Iran's former president.

Statoil has said it paid two installments totaling $5.2 million to Horton's bank account in Turks and Caicos, a British colony in the Caribbean, and doesn't know who ultimately got the money.

"We admit that these payments are bribes that were made in 2002 and 2003," company spokesman Ola Morten Aanestad said today in an interview. Rafsanjani "was the real other half in the agreement" with Horton, he said.

The inquiry sparked the resignations of top executives at Statoil. Chairman Leif Terje Loeddesoel, Chief Executive Officer Olav Fjell and head of international activities Richard Hubbard all quit in September 2003. Bloomberg