NEW YORK, Sept 1: An American-owned company operating from Kuwait paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes to US contracting officers in efforts to win over $11 million business, the government says in court documents, the New York Times reported on Friday.

The US Army last month suspended the company, Lee Dynamics International, from doing business with the government, and the case now appears to be at the centre of a contracting fraud scandal that prompted Defence Secretary Robert M. Gates to dispatch the Pentagon inspector-general to Iraq to investigate, the newspaper said.

The newspaper said the court documents filed in the case say the Army took action because the company was suspected of paying hundreds of thousands in bribes to Army officers to secure contracts to build, operate and maintain warehouses in Iraq that stored weapons, uniforms, vehicles and other material for Iraqi forces in 2004 and 2005.

But a lawyer for the company denied the accusations.

The paper says Maj Gloria D. Davis, a contracting official in Kuwait, shot and killed herself in Baghdad in December last year.

Government officials say the officer committed suicide a day after she admitted to an Army investigator that she had accepted at least $225,000 in bribes from the company.

The United States has begun proceedings to seize Major Davis’s assets, a move her heirs are contesting.