Charges filed in Valley Metro bus scandal

Saturday, January 14, 2012
By Laurence Hammack
The Roanoke Times

Three years after the start of an investigation into bid-rigging at Roanoke’s bus system, federal authorities have filed their first charges.

Court documents unsealed Friday named Diane Holdren, the owner of an interior design firm and the wife of William “Chip” Holdren, the former assistant general manager of Valley Metro.

Diane Holdren’s company, Holdren’s Interiors, was awarded contracts for an office renovation at the bus system’s headquarters that were the result of a bid-rigging scheme, federal authorities allege.

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Coliseum finance director earned Visa points on stadium upgrade

By Paul Pringle and Rong-Gong Lin II, Los Angeles Times
December 10, 2011, 5:15 p.m.

Last spring, the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum set out to upgrade the sound system for its new video board. The equipment and shipping costs were steep — about $270,000.

Finance Director Ronald Lederkramer could have bought the gear the way other government agencies do, by issuing a check from the taxpayer-owned stadium.

Instead, he put the package of high-powered loudspeakers on his personal Chase Visa card, charging it in installments and paying those off with government checks that he and a lower-ranking employee signed, according to records and interviews.

In the process, depending on which Visa he used, Lederkramer earned roughly enough redeemable reward points for a week at the downtown Ritz-Carlton, two Bulova watches or even a pair of first-class round-trip United Airlines tickets to London or Tokyo worth as much as $24,000, award schedules show.

What Lederkramer did with all those points is unclear. But experts say his actions were a breach of duty, raising questions of whether a conflict of interest — his stake in the reward points — influenced his decisions as an official responsible for safeguarding the public’s money.

“This is absurd and appears to violate every procurement policy the city of Los Angeles has in place to protect taxpayers,” City Controller Wendy Greuel told The Times in an email.

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Fed health regulators at risk of conflict of interest

By Jim McElhatton – The Washington Times
Thursday, August 25, 2011

Inspectors are warning that federal health regulators are in danger of unwittingly violating conflict of interest laws because of a lack of documentation on conflict of interest waivers.

Under federal ethics rules, employees aren’t supposed to participate in matters in which they have a financial interest, including recent employment, grants and stock ownership. But in some instances, employees can receive a special waiver if officials decide the need for the employee’s services outweigh potential conflict of interest issues.

However, the Office of Inspector General for the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) in a report released this week said more than half of the 50 waivers they randomly reviewed from 2009 lacked the recommended documentation.

Some waivers didn’t describe the employees specific financial interest, for example. And although not required, several of the conflict of interest waivers were not dated or signed by the employee.

The inspector general’s office said the lack of signatures was especially troubling.

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Houston ISD officials’ defense of contracts for friends ‘idiotic,’ ‘questionable’: Critics

Tuesday, Aug 23, 2011, 08:14AM CST
By Mike Cronin

Answering questions about no-bid contracts and business deals awarded to school board members’ friends, Houston Independent School District officials have replied that no laws or rules were violated.

That explanation troubles those such as Gene Maeroff.

“It’s idiotic. People know right from wrong,” said Maeroff, author of School Boards in America: A Flawed Exercise in Democracy and founder of the Hechinger Institute at Teachers College, Columbia University, in New York. He’s also board president of Edison Township public schools, the fifth-largest school district in New Jersey, with about 14,000 students.

Nothing in the HISD code of ethics bars board members from voting on contracts if he or she is a friend of the respective vendor. State law does not require competitive bidding on work that falls under the category of “professional services” like legal or consulting services.

Those omissions allowed HISD board President Paula Harris to vote to approve four contracts that included work for Westco, a Houston-based company owned by Harris’ friend, Nicole West. Harris and West are close enough that they traveled to Italy together in April. Westco has also done more than $100,000 in smaller projects for HISD that did not require the school board’s approval, and has been paid about $1.7 million by the district in total.

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Modesto councilman’s firm can’t work with program

Thursday, Aug. 04, 2011
By Ken Carlson
Modesto Bee

Modesto officials and government auditors continue to gather the facts about potential conflicts of interest involving City Councilman Joe Muratore and a business partner who received millions in federal housing funds.

City Councilman Joe Muratore and business partner Ryan Swehla ran afoul of federal rules that prohibit elected and appointed officials from getting a financial benefit from the Neighborhood Stabilization Program.

Those rules are different from California’s political reform laws, which can result in fines or even criminal penalties for officials who participate in government decisions that give them financial gain.

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Court documents reveal how controversial contract for Jordan-Elbridge official Paula VanMinos was negotiated

Wednesday, August 03, 2011, 9:19 AM
By John O’Brien / The Post-Standard

Jordan, NY — A Jordan-Elbridge school administrator was having a romantic affair with her boss when the two of them used deception to sneak her lucrative contract past school board members, a lawyer for the district argued in court papers this week.

Those secret dealings should absolve the district of its duty to pay for the legal defense of former interim Superintendent Lawrence Zacher and former Director of Operations Paula VanMinos in a lawsuit filed against Jordan-Elbridge, wrote John Sickinger, a lawyer for the district.

The court filing is the school district’s first public acknowledgment of the alleged affair and the conflicts of interest it posed. It also sheds light on a mystery that has surrounded VanMinos’ contract over the past three months — how the contract came into existence.

Zacher helped VanMinos “perpetrate a fraud” on the district by not disclosing their personal relationship and the highly favorable revisions to VanMinos’ contract before the board approved it in February, Sickinger wrote in the court filing. VanMinos arranged to have the district’s former lawyer, Danny Mevec, who was fired five weeks earlier, help her write the contract without board approval, Sickinger wrote.

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Pentagon Research Agency Faces U.S. Conflict-of-Interest Audit

By David Lerman – Aug 17, 2011 10:36 AM PT

The U.S. Defense Department Inspector General has begun an audit of contracting practices at the Pentagon’s top research and development agency in response to questions about a potential conflict of interest involving the agency’s director.

The audit will “determine the adequacy” of the contracting process used by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, according to a letter from the inspector general’s office to the Project on Government Oversight, a nonprofit independent watchdog group.

The group raised concerns in May that the defense agency had awarded about $1.75 million in contracts to RedXDefense LLC since July 2009, when the company’s co-founder and former chief executive, Regina Dugan, became director of the Pentagon agency.

Dugan’s continued financial and familial relationships with RedXDefense “raise concerns as to whether DARPA effectively prevents conflicts of interest,” wrote Danielle Brian, executive director of the Project on Government Oversight, in a May 9 letter requesting the audit.

The inspector general’s office agreed to conduct an audit of all agency contracting and a separate review of contracts the agency awarded to RedXDefense.

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Jobs Agency Focus Of Federal Investigation

August 17, 2011
WESH Orlando

ORLANDO, Fla. — Central Florida’s jobs agency is the focus of a federal investigation looking for possible criminal activity.

All of the board members of Workforce Central Florida have been notified by the agency’s attorney to prepare for possible questioning.

Each of the state’s 24 jobs agencies are being investigated but Workforce Central Florida is one of the first the feds will be visiting.

Investigators said they want to find out if the board of the jobs agency broke any rules while granting contracts to businesses it’s members had a connection to.

In July, Gov. Rick Scott acknowledged the U.S. Department of Labor was investigating the contracting practices of Florida’s 24 regional workforce boards, including Workforce Central Florida.

On Monday, Workforce Central Florida Chairman Larry Haber, confirmed the investigation is for possible criminal conflict of interest and he’s warned each of his board members to prepare for possible questioning by the feds.

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