Amazon’s director of government sector has been found to have advised a senior US official on the launch of a web portal for federal procurement of commercial products, something that would have given the e-commerce giant a dominant role in the project, The Guardian reported on Wednesday.
The newspaper cited email correspondence between Amazon’s Anne Rung and Government Services Authority official Mary Davie, obtained by the outlet under the Freedom of Information Act. The emails showed Rung advise Davie on the approach the government should take to building an e-commerce platform that would manage federal contracts for anything from stationery to furniture worth billions of dollars.
The outlet said US ethics laws require former government officials to wait a year before getting involved in projects that they worked on while in office.