NEW YORK — The former chief marketing officer of U.S. Foodservice Inc., a subsidiary of supermarket giant Royal Ahold NV, was sentenced to seven years in prison yesterday for his role in a widespread securities fraud.

Mark Kaiser, 52, of Ellicott City, Md., could have gotten life in prison for crimes that the federal prosecutor called “an astonishing degree of corruption at the highest levels of corporate America.”

“I have learned I made bad decisions and bad mistakes,” Kaiser told the judge. “The past four years have been a suffocating experience. I wouldn’t wish them on my worst enemy, if I had one.”

Netherlands-based Ahold’s U.S. properties include the Stop & Shop and Giant supermarket chains. U.S. Foodservice is one of the country’s largest distributors of food products to restaurants and cafeterias.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Lawrence Gerschwer had asked for a sentence of up to 20 years. Prosecutors had portrayed Kaiser as the creator of a fraud to overstate earnings by $800 million from 2000 to 2003 by reporting fake rebates from suppliers, moves which increased their own bonuses.

Defense lawyer Richard Morvillo asked that his client get no jail time, saying more than a dozen others who had pleaded guilty or admitted roles in the fraud were not sentenced to prison.

Kaiser pleaded for leniency as well, telling U.S. District Judge Thomas P. Griesa he was never “fueled or driven by greed in anything I have ever done.”

The judge said he had to sentence Kaiser to prison because the criminal conduct was serious.

“It was deliberate,” Griesa added. “He had a leadership role and he got other people into trouble.”