A Nebraska company that was awarded one of the first contracts to build President Trump’s border wall is an offshoot of a construction company that has been sued repeatedly for failing to pay subcontractors, the Associated Press reported on Friday.
SWF Constructors, which was also accused in a 2016 audit of shady billing practices, was awarded the $11 million contract to build part of the wall in California. According to the AP, they have just one employee in their Omaha, Nebraska office. SWF is listed on the bid for the contract, but Coastal Environmental Group, its parent group, is listed in online government documents as its owner.
Thomas Anderson, an Omaha lawyer who initially represented a subcontractor that sued Coastal in 2011, told the AP that he wouldn’t be surprised if listing SWF instead of Coastal Environmental in official documents was an effort on the company’s part to dodge scrutiny over past legal questions, something Anderson said is a common practice in construction.
In 2011, the federal government reportedly sued Coastal Environmental, accusing the company of failing to pay subcontractor Enviroworks Inc. nearly $400,000 in labor and equipment costs and for reneging on a profit sharing agreement, ultimately cheating Enviroworks out of about $1.7 million. According to the AP, Enviroworks was forced to lay off most of its employees after Coastal Environmental failed to pay the previously agreed-to amount; Coastal Environmental was also accused of immediately hiring the employees who had been laid off for its own business and continuing to do the work to which Enviroworks had previously been entitled.
In 2014, Coastal Environmental was sued again for reportedly failing to pay another subcontractor, SF Marina Systems of Gloucester, Virginia, more than $175,000 for concrete docks the company had built for the U.S. Coast Guard facility in New York. After months of contentious back and forth, the two parties finally agreed to an undisclosed settlement in 2015.
Neither Coastal Environmental nor SWF Constructors responded to the AP’s numerous requests for comment.
The SWF contract is hardly the first time the Trump administration has made business deals with shady entities.
Last October, Whitefish Energy, an inexperienced company with only two employees, entered into a contract with Puerto Rico’s public utility company to help restore power to the island following Hurricane Maria, which had crippled the island’s electric grid. Whitefish ultimately charged Puerto Rico more than double the regular wages for utility workers and high daily meal rates. The company also had trouble getting equipment to Puerto Rico, forcing the Puerto Rican government to hire expensive charter flights, according to details of the deal made public last November.
Earlier this month, details of another shady contract in Puerto Rico were made public. In October, an Atlanta woman won a $156 million contract to provide 30 million meals to Puerto Ricans in need, but ultimately delivered only 50,000. The woman awarded the contract, Tiffany Brown, had no employees and had subcontracted with another company, Cooking With A Star, but according to WUSA9, the only address listed to Cooking With A Star was a P.O. box. Another company, Breedlove Foods, was also part of the contract, but allegedly stopped producing meals when its workers were not paid on time.
FEMA terminated the meal-delivery contract in just 20 days, on Oct. 23, 2017, before the entire $156 million budget was spent “due to late delivery of the approved heater meals.”