Mary Mooney, the executive director of International Adoption Guides, has entered a guilty plea for fraud and bribery in Ethiopian adoptions. This means that the three Americans charged in this case–the others are James Harding and Alisa Bivens–have all pled guilty to charges brought against them in a Department of Justice indictment last February.

Harding and Bivens have not yet been sentenced. Mooney entered her plea yesterday. The Department of Justice press release about Mooney’s plea is available here. Interestingly, her guilty plea seems largely to involve providing false statements to the Council on Accreditation, which is the entity that accredits international adoption agencies under the Hague Convention on Intercountry Adoption.”Without that accreditation,” says the DoJ press release, “IAG would not have been legally permitted facilitate intercountry adoptions…and numerous families would have never retained IAG to provide adoption services.”

The IAG Ethiopian staff person also named in the DoJ indictment remains, apparently, in Ethiopia. Ethiopia has not yet made any public statements regarding IAG or the fraud and bribery by IAG, which included payments to Ethiopian officials.

These guilty pleas are very big and wonderful news for the adoptive and Ethiopian birth families involved, though of course they don’t change the devastating deception and fraud that occurred.

Sentencing hearings for Bivens, Harding, and Mooney will take place in the US District Court in South Carolina; the date has yet to be scheduled.