Perdido 03

Perdido 03

Thursday, May 5, 2016

Investigative Post Finds More Double Dealing In Cuomo's Buffalo Billion Project

I'm posting three, four, five times a day and I'm STILL not able to keep up with all the Cuomo corruption news.

Here's another item, courtesy of Investigative Post (which broke the Buffalo Billion story initially and may have interested the US attorney in investigating it):

Questionable dealings by officials managing the Buffalo Billion didn’t begin or end with the selection of a politically wired developer to oversee the construction of the SolarCity plant in South Buffalo.
In fact, before LPCiminelli started developing the SolarCity facility, the state-affiliated development corporation managing the Buffalo Billion awarded a $20.3 million contract to design the plant to an architecture firm whose president, Thomas Birdsey, sat on the board of a closely related entity.

Both development corporations were controlled by Alain Kaloyeros, the so-called nanotech guru and Gov. Cuomo’s point person on upstate economic development projects.

It wasn’t the first time EYP Architecture & Engineering had been chosen by the development corporations to work on major projects. Since 2013, the firm has been awarded work on at least five projects across upstate, both during and after its president’s stint on one of the development corporation’s boards.

“For any non-profit, it’s a huge red flag for self-dealing and corruption to have board members doing significant business of any kind whatsoever,” said John Kaehny, executive director of good government group Reinvent Albany.

Meanwhile, the law firm of Whiteman Osterman Hanna has been collecting fees from both the state-affiliated development corporations and the companies they were doing business with.

In the case of the Buffalo Billion, the firm has represented both LPCiminelli, as lobbyist, and the Fort Schuyler Management Corp., which has overall responsibility for the SolarCity project, as attorney.
The law firm’s government relations subsidiary is headed by Todd Howe, a longtime Cuomo associate currently under scrutiny from U.S Attorney Preet Bharara as part of a wide-ranging investigation.

The takeaway from all this?

“There’s all sorts of overlapping ties and roles in the SUNY Poly empire. Everywhere you turn it seems you bump into the same set of consultants and companies,” said E. J. McMahon, president of the Empire Center for Public Policy.

Go on over to Investigative Post and read the whole piece by Charlotte Keith.

It's more evidence that the further investigators and journalists dig into Cuomo, his donors, his minions, his contracts and his projects, the more interlinking stuff they find - all of it dubious at best.

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