Top MTA official says agency is fine with corrupt contractors
The MTA is fine with hiring contractors with histories of corruption — because the transit agency wants to help them mend their ways, a top official claimed Monday.
“New York City Transit and the MTA as a whole for many, many, many years — for the 30 years that I’ve been here and for many before that — have looked at this as a rehabilitative organization,” senior Vice President Stephen Plochochi said.
The astounding admission — during a meeting of the MTA’s Transit Committee — prompted howls of outrage from committee members who could hardly believe their ears.
“If we have other companies out there that are willing to do the work, why on earth would we want to continue to go back to the well and deal with people who have repeatedly shown themselves to not rehabilitate their behavior?” fumed board member Peter Ward, president of the New York Hotel & Motel Trades Council.
Another board member, Charles Moerdler, a partner at the white-shoe law firm Stroock & Stroock & Lavan, fumed that the MTA was “encouraging misconduct, which I will not tolerate.”
“When people commit crimes ranging from bribery to worse, we have a public responsibility as fiduciaries to make sure that there is no reoccurrence,” Moerdler added.
The issue arose during discussion of contract extensions with Siemens AG and AECOM for subway-signal upgrades and design work on the Cortlandt Street station near Ground Zero.
In 2008, Siemens paid a then-record $1.6 billion in fines to settle bribery allegations in the US and Germany that a Justice Department official said included “the time-tested method of suitcases filled with cash.”
More recently, the company struck a 2012 deal with Greece worth 330 million euros over bribery allegations involving contracts tied to the 2004 Olympic Games in Athens, and in 2016 it agreed to pay Israel $43 million over claims it paid off executives at state-owned electric company.
AECOM, meanwhile, was accused in 2009 of overcharging the Army for items including vehicle parts and hardware during the post-war reconstruction of Iraq, and in 2016 agreed to pay the feds $57.5 million to settle claims over substandard work at a former nuclear-weapons plant.
Plochochi said the MTA has a “robust program” for overseeing contractors that includes assigning monitors to ensure “good ethics and compliance” by companies with checkered pasts.