that's Corruption with a capital C
You think? But, but their newly hired PR chief in NYC says contract was all done in good faith.
As was everything before the hurricane: closing 200 schools, cutting off the power for 3 hours a night in rural areas to avoid overtime, not replacing hundreds of PREPA workers who retired abruptly to get their pension activated, and bleeding maintainance via a huge new slush fund dished out to upper management.
http://dailycaller.com/2017/10/27/report-puerto-ricos-300-million-deal-with-utility-company-prevents-govt-audits/http://dailycaller.com/2017/08/08/bankrupt-puerto-rico-gave-millions-to-sketchy-firms-with-government-ties/https://www.economist.com/blogs/dailychart/2011/08/americas-fiscal-unionhttps://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21730432-even-hurricane-maria-hit-it-was-mess-story-puerto-ricos-power-grid"Puerto Rico has a history of dolling out shady government contracts and questionable deals with various private entities.
The island’s officials filed for bankruptcy in May and recently closed nearly 200 schools to save $7 million, while simultaneously issuing 107 consulting contracts since January to questionable recipients, according to a report in September from The Daily Caller News Foundation’s Ethan Barton.
Puerto Rico spent $256 billion in federal funds from 1990 through 2009, but only collected $74 billion in tax revenue. The U.S. territory is
required to prioritize payments to creditors unless the funds go to essential services.
About $4.7 million in consulting contracts went to companies with ties to government officials, more than $800,000 of which were public relations groups. Consulting contracts totaling nearly $389,000 were awarded to the marketing firm KOI Americas, which is owned by Edwin Miranda, a friend of former Puerto Rico Gov. Luis Fortuño.
“The contract was done in good faith with PREPA (Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority)” and “speaks for itself,” Whitefish spokesman Ken Luce told MSNBC in an interview, adding later: “There’s nothing there.” (Reporting by Susan Heavey; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama
he story of PREPA is the story of Puerto Rico. The utility, created by a New Deal governor in 1941, powered rapid industrialisation in the 1970s as American pharmaceutical and other firms flocked to the island to take advantage of federal tax benefits. By offering stable, well-paid jobs to electrical workers, PREPA helped create a Puerto Rican middle class, says José Caraballo Cueto, an economist at the University of Puerto Rico. The boom was short-lived. When the federal government peeled back the tax perks in 1996, factories started leaving and PREPA began losing customers.
Declining revenues were exacerbated by political patronage, corruption and inefficiency. Municipalities and government agencies do not pay for electricity in Puerto Rico. Successive governments spent tens of millions of dollars evaluating solar and natural-gas projects in order to wean PREPA off its dependence on oil, but did next to nothing. Less than 3% of the island’s energy came from renewables.
PREPA is responsible for $9bn of Puerto Rico’s $73bn of debt. As PREPA and other agencies borrowed billions of dollars from international creditors (and from each other, a practice some have compared to a Ponzi scheme), the utility started skimping on maintenance. In 2014 an austerity law prompted hundreds of experienced employees to retire and claim their pensions before cuts took effect. They were never replaced. The result, according to Synapse’s report, was generator failures, blackout rates four times higher than other American utilities, rising consumer costs, environmental violations and an increasing numbers of worker injuries and fatalities. A three-day blackout in 2016 caused by a fire at the Aguirre plant foreshadowed the darkness and economic standstill Hurricane Maria would bring. “We took the risk and we are paying the price,” says Mr Torres, peering at his poster.
The reconstruction has begun in an unusual fashion. Puerto Rico has hired a tiny Montana-based contracting company called Whitefish Energy to oversee grid restoration. Normally, states and municipalities contact a “mutual aid network” that can quickly mobilise thousands of repairmen. “But Puerto Rico never said ‘Hey, we need crews’,” says Mike Hyland of the American Public Power Association (APPA), which represents 1,100 utilities. Mr Rosselló originally claimed he could not get in touch with the APPA, and then later explained that he began negotiating with Whitefish before Hurricane Maria. The company had responded to a request for repair work after Hurricane Irma, and it appeared to be Puerto Rico’s cheapest option. José Roman of the Puerto Rican Energy Commission, an independent body created in 2014 to regulate and monitor PREPA, confirmed that no official bidding process took place. “The government was in emergency mode,” he said.
“It wasn’t like all the big guys were jumping up and down to go to a bankrupt island,” said Ken Luce, a Hill & Knowlton spokesman hired by Whitefish a week ago. The company, which has two full-time employees, began as a joint-venture in 2015 with a Brazilian company called Comtrafo to build a transformer plant in Montana,
a project that has since sputtered out."
Edit: The contract was taken down off the web at 11:00 am Friday; however thousands of people of people downloaded the document or still have its tab open. Note 'document-cloud' only serves the pages a browser is displaying. To see more, you must scroll down and wait for that portion to load. The pdf too is an image that does not allow text searching.
Andrew Freeman has a careful account:
http://mashable.com/2017/10/27/shadiest-details-puerto-rico-contract-whitefish-energy/#slJZ9RR1iZqn"By comparison, minimum wage in Puerto Rico is $7.25 an hour. According to Indeed.com, the average salary for a journeyman electrical lineman is $39.03 per hour in the continental U.S. However, a journeyman lineman on Whitefish Energy's Puerto Rico project will earn $277.88 per hour."
"UTIER, the electrical workers' union of Puerto Rico, expressed alarm at those rates, tweeting: "We need support and help, but under these conditions it is impossible and questionable. Who allowed this?""
https://twitter.com/utier/status/922788140938596355