From the Daily News:One of the world’s biggest contractors routinely inflated bills on high-profile construction jobs over the last decade, ripping off taxpayers and developers alike, prosecutors charged Tuesday.
Bovis Lend Lease - which has billions of dollars of public and private construction work around the city and world - was for the first time hit with criminal charges.
But the company, after dodging charges in the 2007 Deutsche Bank tower fire, will again avoid prosecution after paying $50 million in fines and restitution — and agreeing to clean up its act.
The company was charged with three counts of fraud conspiracy.
At the same time, a top Bovis executive in New York, James Abadie, pleaded guilty to fraud conspiracy charges in Brooklyn Federal Court.
Abadie admitted he and other unnamed Bovis executives let the laborers union “add one or two hours of overtime to their time sheets every day whether they worked it or not." They passed these costs on to their customers.
Abadie was released on $500,000 bond. He faces up to 12 and a half years in prison.
Prosecutors noted that some of the alleged fraud was committed in buildings next to and across the street from the courthouse where Abadie pleaded guilty.
2 comments:
A drop in the bucket.
How many other developers are still walking around free to do their crooked business?
Ya know, when the Carpenters' union pulled stuff like this, the federal government put them into receivership (and rightly so). How about a civil RICO suit against Bovis, Preet?
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