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FNC: If you listened to Chinese state-run media, you’d think President Trump went to China and released vials of COVID-19 on groups of unsuspecting men, women and children.
Beijing has been bending over backward trying to convince the world that the United States is the real culprit behind the quickly spreading virus that’s already claimed more than 4,600 lives across the globe.
It’s a high-stakes strategy for the Asian nation fighting to keep its superpower status amid a national lockdown and palpable anger over claims that Wuhan, China, the epicenter of the coronavirus, at first covered it up, triggering a worldwide health and economic crisis.
The Chinese government has already published a book in English — with translations in the works in French, Spanish, Russian and Arabic — touting its handling of the deadly disease.
At best, China’s aggressive new campaign can be chalked up to ambitious propaganda. At its worst, it’s a reckless display from a country that has actively misled the world while working overtime to save its own skin, foreign affairs expert Gordon G. Chang told Fox News.
Chang believes Beijing has been laying the groundwork for a PR attack against the United States for more than a month, first by throwing doubt on the origin of COVID-19 and second, by slamming America’s handling of previous diseases like the swine flu, which decimated China’s pork industry.
On Sunday, Lin Songtian, China’s ambassador to South Africa, said: “Although the epidemic first broke out in China, it did not necessarily mean that the virus is originated from China, let alone ‘made in China.’
Although the epidemic first broke out in China, it did not necessarily mean that the virus is originated from China, let alone “made in China”. pic.twitter.com/EVXLkQnyfF
— Chinese Ambassador to South Africa (@AmbLINSongtian) March 7, 2020
Vague and misleading statements like the one from Lin are ripped right out of China’s propaganda playbook and attempt to sow doubt about the global crisis.
Chang said it’s just another tactic in China’s playbook, carefully choreographed to make Americans look petty and racist.
“This an all-out assault on the United States,” Chang said.
In December, when the coronavirus was first detected in Wuhan, many media around the world began referring to it as the “Wuhan virus.” But last month, the World Health Organization renamed the illness COVID-19 so as not to link it to a specific location or group of people.
The name change didn’t stop some, like Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who blew past warnings and deliberately referred to it as the “Wuhan virus” after China’s foreign ministry called it “highly irresponsible” to do so.
President Donald Trump’s national security adviser, Robert O’Brien, went even further Wednesday.
“Unfortunately, rather than using best practices, this outbreak in Wuhan was covered up,” O’Brien said at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative-leaning think tank in Washington. “There’s lots of open-source reporting from China, from Chinese nationals, that the doctors involved were either silenced or put in isolation, or that sort of thing, so that the word of this virus could not get out. It probably cost the world community two months.”
O’Brien said if experts would have had those two months to get ahead of the spread of the virus, “I think we could have dramatically curtailed what happened both in China and what’s now happening across the world.”
Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., said the Communist Party is pointing the finger at the U.S. so it can dampen discontent back home.
“The Chinese military portal Xilu.com recently published an article baselessly claiming that the virus is ‘a biochemical weapon produced by the U.S. to target China,’” Rubio said.
Arkansas Republican Sen. Tom Cotton, has frequently used the term “Wuhan virus” on the Senate floor.
Earlier this week, several social media users took House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., to task when he referred to it as “the Chinese coronavirus.”
Instead of backing down, Chang believes officials should keep calling COVID-19 the “Wuhan virus” and push back on accusations of racism.
“This isn’t a Republican thing. We all need to unite and for people to say, ‘this is racist’ is irresponsible,” Chang said. “There is no race known as Wuhanese.”
Chang also said calling COVID-19 the “Wuhan virus” or “Chinese coronavirus” keeps pressure on the Chinese government and forces it to be held accountable by the rest of the world for its initial response to the global crisis, which was widely regarded as abysmal.
China, though, is using everything in its arsenal to paint itself as a global hero, rewriting history and going so far as to demand a thank you for containing the virus as long as it did.
“We should say righteously that the U.S. owes China an apology, the world owes China a thank you,” an editorial on state news agency Xinhua read.
Also peculiar is that Beijing — which is normally quick to censor news — has refused to step in as a wave of anti-American conspiracy theories flood the internet. Among the rumors is that the U.S. created the coronavirus to make China look bad as well as one that accuses the government of covering up thousands of deaths by classifying them as the regular flu.
“It’s more than just some disinformation or an official narrative,” Xiao Qiang, an adjunct professor at the University of California at Berkeley’s Schools of Information, told The Washington Post. “It’s an orchestrated, all-out campaign by the Chinese government through every channel at a level you rarely see. It’s a counteroffensive.”
Remember the accusations during the Trump impeachment trial that Ukraine had cleaned up corruption? President Trump withheld aid for a couple of very legitimate reasons including corruption in the Ukraine military, corruption in the banking system and money-laundering. The Democrats continued to place guilt of dying Ukrainians because of the military conflict with Russia in the lap of President Trump. Then there was that pesky Internet Research Agency in St. Petersburg that spread propaganda across the world.
Ladies and gentlemen…it is still happening over there…where is the media? Where is Shifty Schiff and Nasty Nadler? Maria Yovanovitch is retired but gotta wonder what she knew.
Anyway read on….this is yet but only part of what continues to go on in Ukraine…Rudy Giuliani is working many other channels.
Hat tip to the REAL investigative reporters on the case…well done.
Luxury cars line the parking lot of the upscale Mandarin Plaza mall in Kyiv, while their well-heeled owners flaunt their wealth in its jewellery and designer clothes stores.
But hidden on its upper floors, protected by armed guards and under the constant surveillance of security cameras, a very different product is being sold.
Sitting elbow-to-elbow under fluorescent lights, a multi-lingual army of call center staff hawk get-rich-quick dreams across the world in the form of cryptocurrency and stock investments for a company called Milton Group.
Now, a cache of documents handed to the Swedish daily Dagens Nyheter by a whistleblower from inside the call center, and shared with OCCRP, exposes the inner workings of this type of fraud: an old-fashioned boiler-room scam that leverages the power of social media to operate on a global scale.
Armed with a list of over 1,000 people targeted by the call center, reporters from 21 countries and dozens of media outlets spoke to more than 180 victims, revealing a trail of ruined lives from Sweden’s Arctic Circle to the Ecuadorian Amazon, passing through small industrial towns in the Balkans and major world cities like London and Sydney.
The stories were strikingly similar. Many first came into contact with the scam through Facebook ads promising remarkable returns on investments. After entering their contact details to find out more, victims would be deluged with high-pressure sales calls. They would make a small “investment” that quickly yielded impressive — but fake — profits. But requests to withdraw the full funds were not honored.
Those worst affected were preyed upon by the call center’s “retention” desk, whose job was to conjure up new ways to extract more money, often through brutal psychological pressure. Some were harassed into taking out huge loans, threatened by forged letters from UK financial regulators demanding taxes, or contacted by fake lawyers offering to help get their money back — for yet another fee. In the most extreme cases, Milton Group’s retention specialists would convince victims to install software on their computers that allowed the scammers to control them remotely, and steal more money in the process. Some lost more than $200,000.
The victims, fooled by foreign names and addresses, and assurances of sky-high returns, believed they were on the phone with a legitimate investment business based in Western Europe. They had no inkling that the people on the other end of the line were largely young Ukrainians or Middle Eastern and African migrants in Kyiv.
Some tried to report their losses to police in their countries, but law enforcement largely failed to connect the dots. Cyber-crime units in multiple countries affected by the call center, including Spain and Italy, told OCCRP and its partners that they were aware of such cross-border frauds, but that they are hard to detect, often go unreported, and require cooperation between law enforcement bodies across many jurisdictions.
However, Swedish authorities have now opened an investigation based on the whistleblower’s extensive evidence, and have been in touch with Europol about the allegations.
“This company what they do, everything is fake,” said Alexey, the whistleblower. (His real name cannot be used to protect his safety.) “They just steal money from people.”
He said staff were told the Kyiv center took in a massive 65 million euros in sales in 2019. To celebrate, the company’s leaders threw a lavish New Year’s party themed around the novel “The Great Gatsby,” about a Jazz-Age bootlegger and con artist. Under neon lights, hundreds of Milton staffers watched contortionists and fire-dancers perform, and were awarded prizes, including cars, cash, and free lodging, for especially good salesmanship.
Milton is apparently tied to other call centers in Albania, Georgia, and North Macedonia employing hundreds more staff.
While it is impossible to determine whether every investment that passed through the Kyiv center was fraudulent, reporters from DN and across OCCRP’s network spoke to more than 180 victims listed in Milton’s client database who confirmed they had lost their money in investment scams. A few had been able to withdraw some funds, likely in an attempt to encourage further investments, or remained hopeful they would be able to cash out their “earnings” one day.
The supposed investments were made by transferring funds through Western Union, bank accounts, credit cards, and cryptocurrencies. Milton salespeople received a higher commission if they could convince their clients to pay in bitcoins and other cryptocurrencies, since they are harder to trace. Many of the bank-to-bank transfers were routed through the private accounts of individuals with a UK financial company, with clear instructions not to indicate the money was for investing.
In many cases identified by OCCRP, online credit-card payments were handled by a Cyprus-based company called Naspay, which bills itself as a “state-of-the-art payment gateway” and is owned by David Todua — the same Georgian-Israeli man the whistleblower identified to law enforcement as the person behind Milton Group. (Todua vigorously denies holding any “formal or informal position” in the company, although he conceded that he had attended Milton Group’s New Year’s party as a guest. He also said that Naspay does not process payments, but merely “transfers information” between websites that accept payments and financial institutions. OCCRP did not find evidence Todua has any ownership of Milton.)
After their initial investments, some victims were told they needed to send additional fees in cash to individuals in far-flung countries such as Colombia and Uganda rather than company bank accounts.
Leif Nixon, a Swedish cryptocurrency expert who helps law enforcement investigate bitcoin-related crime, analyzed the bitcoin addresses used by Milton Group to accept payments from its customers. He said the set-up did not appear to be that of a legitimate operator.
He noted several indications that clients’ money was not being invested as promised, including the fact that many different people were told to send their bitcoins to the same few addresses. Clients were also given different addresses each time they made a payment.
“It’s like opening a bank account, but you don’t get an account number; instead, for every deposit you make you get a different account number,” Nixon explained.
Ultimately, he said, $5.9 million in bitcoins from seven of Milton Group’s addresses disappeared into East Asian exchanges in 2019.
“I can’t see why a legitimate operation would make these kinds of transactions,” he said. “It doesn’t make any sense.”
Call center staff were well aware that their job was to steal, the whistleblower says. Alexey told DN that on one of his first days at Milton, the sales manager joked that even when she was as young as six, she dreamed of being a “motherfucker and stealing people’s money.”
At a training session for new staff at a Tbilisi call center linked to the Milton Group, attended by an undercover reporter last month, a trainer explained that the company’s goal was for customers “to lose their money in a realistic way.” Asked why, she laughed: “It’s naive to ask, to be honest. When they lose the money, it stays with us.”
An internal customer database reviewed by reporters is laced with expletives about “fucking” clients out of money, as well as highlighting their vulnerabilities and how they might best be targeted. In one note from October 2019, a Milton staff member wrote of a 67-year-old Swedish woman: “Sold her home to pay, no money, crying.”
That woman, reached by Dagens Nyheter in a rural part of central Sweden, told journalists she was tricked into investing over $100,000 by Milton staff who took out loans on her behalf.
She, like many other victims, was initially sucked in by the illusion that she was making huge profits: “You become hypnotized and brainwashed.”
But when she wanted to withdraw her supposed earnings, “they disappeared.” Today she cannot afford to buy food or pay her rent. “I have nothing to live for,” she said. While Milton Group’s fake investments have brought its victims financial ruin, the picture is very different for the firm’s alleged managers.
A review of their social media profiles shows that they have a penchant for expensive cars, foreign holidays, and guns. Some also have high-level political connections.
The CEO of Milton Group is Jacob Keselman, who declares himself “the Wolf of Kiev” on his Instagram account, a nod to “The Wolf of Wall Street,” the Hollywood film about a notorious penny-stock scammer. His social media profiles are replete with photos of luxury cars, foreign holidays, and the occasional gun. In one photo he can be seen working in a room with a spectacular view of the Eiffel Tower. He writes: “The one who loves his job is truly happy.”
OCCRP could not obtain official information about Keselman’s national origin, but on his LinkedIn profile he writes that his native language is Russian, he attended university in Kyiv, and he did two stints in sales in Israel before joining Milton Group.
Contacted for comment, Keselman denied that Milton Group had defrauded anyone. “You know how it is working, investment and forex brands … a lot of clients lose money because they don’t understand how it’s working,” he said. He went on to claim that Milton only provided IT support for companies selling investments. He did not respond to follow-up questions.
David Todua, a 38-year-old Georgian-born Israeli citizen, is a frequent visitor to the call center office in Mandarin Plaza, where according to Alexey the staff knew him as one of Milton Group’s owners.
Alexey said he saw Todua there at least six times, including once in November 2019, when he congratulated the staff on their performance and said Milton had brought in $50 million that year to date. The whistleblower said Todua always travelled with multiple bodyguards.
No official documents connect Todua to the scam call center, which on paper is owned by a different Georgian, Irakli Dadivadze. OCCRP was unable to track down any information about him.
However, Todua does own Naspay, a Cyprus-based payment platform through which Milton processes many of its “investments,” internal documents show.
At the firm’s New Year’s party, a man named David was called up to the stage by Keselman, the CEO, identified as the company’s “father,” and presented with a cake with three candles in it, representing the three years Milton Group had been in operation. The whistleblower identified this “father” as David Todua.
“In December, the company turned three years old,” Keselman said, according to an audio recording of the event obtained by OCCRP. “We are big kids, and our father is proud of us, while we are proud of him. And firstly [we] want to say a big thank you, David. And we want to give a cake, because what birthday is without a cake? And David will blow out the candle today.”
Todua told OCCRP he had been at the firm’s New Year’s party as a guest of Keselman, but denied holding any role in the company. “I am not father of any company, I am a proud father of 5 children,” he said.
On Instagram, he calls himself david_todua_007 and poses with a golden Kalashnikov, shoots with a sniper rifle, celebrates birthdays with a champagne tower, and posts photos of expensive cars parked outside his home. (“Hunting is indeed one of my hobbies,” he told OCCRP.)
He also has business ties with a surprising number of politicians from several countries, including ministers and other figures from the United National Movement party, which governed Georgia under President Mikheil Saakashvili for almost a decade until 2012. Saakashvili later became a Ukrainian citizen and forged a political career in the country.
Little is known about Todua’s life in Israel, where he migrated with his family in 1993, but court records and posts from his social media accounts show that he lived until recently in a villa near Tel Aviv. Today he lives in Cyprus.
In Albania, which boasts a 400-strong call center that also appears to be linked to Milton Group, the company operating it is owned by an adviser to a senior minister.
Although David Todua’s family left Georgia for Israel when he was just 11, as an adult he has ties to a surprising number of prominent political figures from his home country.
Most notably, his business partner in two Ukrainian companies is Davit Kezerashvili, an ex-defense minister and former chief of Georgia’s financial police under Saakashvili.
Todua and Kezerashivili co-own Project Partners, a real-estate and construction firm that is based out of a neighboring office building in Kyiv as Milton Group. Its head is Gia Getsadze, a former deputy justice minister in both Georgia and Ukraine.
Project Partners, in turn, co-owns a construction and civil engineering firm, Elitekomfortbud, with another former Georgian official, Petre Tsiskarishvili, a minister of agriculture under Saakashvili and a former leader of his United National Movement party.
Kezerashvili was charged in 2013 with accepting some $12 million in bribes to turn a blind eye to massive smuggling of alcohol from Ukraine to Georgia. He was ultimately cleared of the charges, which he says were politically motivated, but continues to live outside Georgia.
OCCRP has found no evidence that any of the former ministers are involved in the call center. In an email, Kezerashvili said he had never heard of Milton Group and had no knowledge of its activities, but confirmed that he was a business partner of Todua.
“You Will Never Regret This Decision”
Milton Group’s Kyiv call center does not appear unusual at first glance: Hundreds of phone sellers sit side by side, headsets on, using modern telephone and customer management systems.
Workers make up to 300 calls a day to clients around the world in an attempt to reach their monthly sales targets and secure bonuses.
The center is split into different sales desks by language — including Russian, English, Italian, and Spanish — each targeting their own areas of the world. Sellers use so-called “stage names” to build trust with the person on the other end of the call: A Senegalese man on the German desk goes by the name “Todd Kaiser,” while a Ukrainian woman whose real name is Daria calls herself “Diana Swan” or “Kira Lively.”
But undercover footage from inside Mandarin Plaza, as well as leaked internal documents, confirm that Milton was no ordinary call center.”
It is protected by burly guards and personal mobile phones are forbidden.
On the walls, next to posters of sports cars, a whiteboard sets out sellers’ monthly targets: $40,000 for the Russian market; $60,000 for Spanish, and $100,000 for those working the English-speaking desk.
The staffers in the sales department are provided with a set of notes explaining exactly how to target “clients” by nationality.
Scandinavians, the notes say, are mostly “old people and they really need someone to talk to.”
People from the UK, Australia, and New Zealand, on the other hand, like to believe they know everything and are certain that their countries are the best in the world, so call center workers are advised to pump them up.
“The only way to Handle [sic] such people is not to argue with them on whatever direction they take and make them feel that they are intelligent,” the notes explain.
“Later talk to them about how important the financial market has become because of great countries like Australia, UK, and New Zealand.”
“You will never regret this decision” is another line suggested to entice customers.
Those targeted by Milton Group are offered the chance to invest in cryptocurrency, stocks, or foreign currencies through a variety of different “brands,” all of which have generic-sounding names and similar websites, and are moved out of the rotation over time. Recently, Milton Group’s brands have included CryptoMB, Cryptobase, and VetoroBanc. All have been subject to recent investor warnings from regulators in the UK, Italy, and Spain.
The precise relationship between the call center and the brands they market is not always clear. Brands are sometimes not associated with any legal entity; when they are, they hide behind offshore secrecy. CryptoMB and VetoroBanc are run by offshore firms in the Marshall Islands and St. Vincent & Grenadines, respectively, while OCCRP could find no evidence that Cryptobase was tied to any specific company.
Alexey told journalists that the supposed VetoroBanc was entirely fabricated inside the Milton offices, with the name chosen by the Italian retention manager because it sounded “like one of the Italian banks.” The VetoroBanc website uses stock images for its staff that appear to have been taken from the internet. “Sylvia Moreno,” a supposed market analyst, is in fact an American pediatrician.
Alexey explained that staff had no specific expertise in financial products, but were carefully taught to sell “emotions.”
“It doesn’t matter which emotions, positive or negative: You can sell those fake products if people are really thinking about that,” he explained.
Clients were often shown huge profits to encourage them to invest further funds, but the money was always just numbers on a screen, the whistleblower explained. The only time victims were allowed to receive any of their funds back was in order to encourage an even bigger investment.
The most promising — and vulnerable — investors were passed on to the “retention team,” where the top salesmen work.
Their job is to “squeeze the money from the clients to the last cent,” Alexey explained, pushing them to borrow money and sell their cars and apartments. In one case, he said, a heavily pregnant Russian woman was convinced to hand over the small nest egg she had scraped together for her baby.
The most prolific and ingenious scammer at Milton Group is a man on the retention team who tells prospective investors his name is “William Bradley.”
In fact, he is a young Iranian who uses images of well-known US salesman and motivational speaker Marc Wayshak — who dubs himself “America’s sales strategist” — to disguise his identity on video calls.
OCCRP was unable to verify his real name, but at work and on social media he goes by “Hamze” and speaks fluent Farsi. Alexey claimed he takes in a massive $450,000 a month.
The call center’s internal customer database tracks how much each client has “invested,” as well as the potential to extract more money from them. Comments seen by OCCRP are laced with profanities and details of clients’ vulnerabilities.
One reads: “I saw 800 EUR in his bank and he is sick, he have problem and he told me I want someone fuck me and I said Foster [another call center operator] will fuck you.”
Another reads: “Getting fucked every month for at least 1000 EUR. Gets pension on the 20th/works every tuesday.”
Notes from the Milton Group’s internal customer database describing the situation of one of their victims, Östen Morian. Credit: Alexander Mahmoud/DN
Of another man, a call center staffer wrote: “Very Old man/pushed him to get the commission payment, hoping he can sort that out today, should call back at 3pm Sweden time.”
A month later, another note appears: “He is at his friend’s home because he doesn’t have money for food. Call him back on Monday, lost 400 k.”
That client was 75-year-old Östen Morian, a retired carpenter who lives close to the Arctic Circle in remote northern Sweden.
Contacted by DN, Morian confirmed he had lost around 400,000 Swedish krona (about $41,000) to the scammers after taking out loans, at 39 percent interest, to make what turned out to be fake investments. He was left heavily indebted.
“I don’t know what I can do,” he said. “Wait to die only.”
Exactly how come Senators Kamala Harris and Dianne Feinstein have nothing to say? Pelosi? Nah….
When Mark Styles was hired in October 2018 to help oversee Central Valley scheduling for the California bullet train, he soon learned he had walked into a mess.
Over the previous half decade the project had repeatedly fallen behind schedule, and the cost by 2018 had jumped from $64 billion to $77 billion in two years.
A core problem was the project’s operating culture, in which managers for WSP, the bullet train’s lead consultant, threatened to punish or terminate employees if they failed to toe the company line, Styles said.
“I was told to shut up and not say anything,” said Styles, a career construction manager who was hired as WSP’s senior supervisory scheduler in the project’s Fresno office. “I was told that I didn’t understand the political arena the project was in. I told them I am not going to shut up. This is my job.”
The atmosphere described by Styles has been corroborated by a half dozen current and former senior officials knowledgeable about the project’s Fresno office.
The officials say it helps explain why California’s high-speed rail endeavor has barreled ahead for more than a decade, despite warnings it was structured on risky assumptions and could run out of money before any trains operate.
WSP spokeswoman Denise Turner Roth rejected Styles’ claims. “We always work carefully with our client to evaluate the demands of each project and to prepare realistic and transparent recommendations regarding schedule and budget,” she said.
But other ex-WSP employees in the Fresno office, including engineer Vera Lovejoy and project controls coordinator Todd Bilstein, say they were also discouraged from sharing bad news with bosses.
“I wanted the project to succeed,” said Lovejoy, who left the project in 2019 after one year. “I was eager to help deliver it. But I couldn’t stay. If you rock the boat, you are labeled as not a team player.”
Bilstein also left in 2019 after a nine-month tenure.
“If I was to give a talk at a construction conference, I would say they were not following generally accepted project management principles,” he said. The company’s failures, he said, ran the gamut of estimating costs, scheduling construction and managing change orders.
“Revealing bad news was discouraged,” he added. “I just couldn’t continue to work there. I don’t work that way. American professionals don’t work that way.”
Styles, who has no lawsuit or other legal claims, is also no longer with WSP. He left in November, calling it “the worst job of my career,” and moved to a new construction job out of state.
Brian Kelly, chief executive of the California High-Speed Rail Authority, said in a statement that the agency “takes seriously any claim of wrongdoing by an employee or contractor. We have procedures in place for any such claim to be raised and reviewed. We have an expectation that all employees act within the law and that our contractors meet the requirements of state and federal law.”
He added in an interview, “Our focus is on the mission in front of us.”
In the last half year, Kelly has moved to make changes in his organization’s culture, replacing numerous middle-level management officials, orchestrating more documentation for its plans and vowing to improve transparency in the agency operations.
WSP and Parsons Brinckerhoff, which merged in 2014, have been on the project since the 1990s. The Montreal firm, one of the largest infrastructure engineering organizations, is working under a $666-million contract. When he arrived at the project’s Fresno office, Styles said, he found a dysfunctional operation like he had never seen before — a pressured environment that aimed to contain bad news that could damage the project’s fortunes.
At the time, the rail authority was confronting delay claims, resulting from its slow acquisition of land, and change orders — both amounting to millions of dollars in higher costs.
Within days, he asked to see the detailed justification documents for the change orders. He said he wanted to understand the delays and how they would affect future construction, a routine part of a scheduler’s job.
WSP management, he said, told him that he didn’t need to see the documents. WSP was pushing to “keep the numbers looking good,” which in some cases involved altering reports written by its staff to make construction progress look better, he alleges.
Styles and other sources speaking off the record say that the bullet train schedule, which calls for installing 119 miles of track and a complex signal system from Madera to Wasco by 2022, is “impossible,” even though the project’s budget is predicated on the completion date.
To install track by 2022 would normally require all of the bridges, viaducts, trenches and other structures to be completed beforehand. As a stopgap measure, the rail authority now plans to install track in five-mile discontinuous segments, which the Federal Railroad Administration has criticized as illogical.
A more likely scenario would have the current construction completed between 2025 and 2028, which would drive costs up and force the state to either find new money or curtail the project, Styles and others said.
Rail authority spokeswoman Annie Parker said the agency has acknowledged repeatedly that “the deadline is a challenge.” It will require boosting monthly construction spending from the current $46 million to $70 million, said chief financial officer Brian Annis, who added that its construction pace is improving.
Sylmar-based Tutor Perini, which is building rail structures in Madera and Fresno counties, said a week ago it will complete its work in 2023. The company’s contract was initially $1 billion, but delay claims and change orders have doubled the amount.
Chief Executive Ron Tutor told security analysts in a recorded telephone call on Feb. 26, “With our extending the completion date from the end of ’21 to the first quarter of ’23, once again, we are in discussions with the owner to resolve payment for that further delay. However, it seems certain that given all of the results and resolves over the last 90 days that that should be the final end date for high-speed rail.”
It would mean that the rail authority could not begin to install track and signals until after that construction is completed.
When The Times asked the rail authority if it had comment on Tutor’s statement, it received an email Friday from Tutor saying his statement to investors had caused “some confusion.” He said that he hopes that “substantial completion” of his company’s work would occur in early 2022, leaving “paperwork, acceptances and contractual documentation” to be completed in early in 2023.
“They have all these people in top jobs with no technical background,” said a top executive at a major European engineering firm, who worked on the project. “They are politicians. They never disclose the full cost. They give you incremental truth. They believe that is a successful business model. They should cancel the contracts and start over.”
The Federal Railroad Administration, which oversees billions of dollars in grants, has long warned the rail authority it risked missing deadlines and was headed for big cost overruns. In December 2016, the FRA warned the statethat the cost of the Central Valley construction could jump by $3.6 billion. After The Times obtained a copy of the confidential report and published its findings, the rail authority denied the legitimacy of the analysis. Today, the cost is even higher than the FRA projected.
WSP said it stands by the job it is doing for the bullet train. “To the extent WSP prepares cost and schedule estimates for the program as a whole, WSP brings world-class talent to the project that prepare professional estimates based on client needs and the information available when generated,” Turner Roth said.
Styles said he was shut out of work not long after taking the job at WSP, though the company did not fire him. Over many months, Styles, who was being paid $170,000 annually, said he kept advising management about the problems and writing procedures for contract compliance.
In a Facebook posting in June, Styles wrote that he had been warned by a co-worker “to be careful” and “you know too much” and to take a lower profile. “I’d rather be dead than a coward,” he wrote.
Styles filed an ethics complaint against his former employer in June, which was examined by a management committee in Chicago. “The committee concluded there was no proof that WSP violated ethics with the state,” he said.
Turner Roth said, “In 2019, an employee — who has since left the company — raised a question about the schedule data submitted to WSP by the construction managers and construction contractors. In response to this question, WSP thoroughly investigated the matter, and concluded there was no wrongful conduct by WSP employees in their review of contractor submissions.”
As for Lovejoy, whose career includes engineering jobs at major public agencies and corporations, she said problems started more a decade ago when the Obama administration issued a $2.5-billion grant from its economic stimulus program, intended for “shovel-ready projects.”
The grant came about four years before the first construction contract was issued, and actual work did not begin for two more years. “It was so far from shovel-ready,” Lovejoy said.
Another former WSP employee, who spoke anonymously out of concern that he would face retribution, supported Styles’ assertionthat monthly and annual reports submitted by staff often were changed by WSP management before they were reviewed in meetings and sent to state executives.
“We gave them the bad news and they wouldn’t accept it,” he said.
The Times has previously reported that the project has struggled to relocate pipes, electrical lines and other infrastructure that stands in the way of securing parcels and laying track. Today, the rail authority is short by 497 of the 2,042 parcels it needs, according to its most recent progress report. In December, the authority acquired only five parcels.
In late 2018, Hemanth Kundeti, a database manager, was hired into the project to help improve property records, but he lasted only several months.
Kundeti, an employee of a subconsultant to WSP, said he developed his own software tool that could track the work more accurately. It would have allowed the state to replace a subcontractor that was charging $2 million annually to maintain the records, he said.
When he proposed the tool to WSP and state officials, it was rejected. In February 2019, he was twice reprimanded for “insubordination” for continuing to promote his software, according to a copy of the reprimand.In response, he wrote on his warning letter that management “without healthy debate is dangerous for any organization.” He was terminated a few weeks later.
“I am still reeling from the after-effects of being terminated for trying to save taxpayers’ money from being wasted,” said Kundeti, who has found a new job.
Biden, Inc., or James Biden in deep legal trouble.
FBI got a search warrant and raided the office….
The Federal Bureau of Investigation raided a health care business linked to Joe Biden’s brother in late January, seizing boxes of documents.
The raid of an Americore Health hospital represented a deepening of the legal morass surrounding James Biden’s recent venture into health care investing at a time when questions about the business dealings of Joe Biden’s relatives, and their alleged connection to the former vice president’s public service, continue to dog his presidential campaign.
In the weeks since the raid, two small medical firms that did business with James Biden have claimed in civil court proceedings to have obtained evidence that he may have fraudulently transferred funds from Americore “outside of the ordinary course of business,” and a former Americore executive has told POLITICO that James Biden had more than half a million dollars transferred to him from the firm as a personal loan that has not yet been repaid.
The purpose of the Jan. 30 raid of an Ellwood City, Pa., hospitalremains unclear, and there is no indication it was related to the actions of Biden’s younger brother, who has not been accused of criminal wrongdoing. Its owner, Americore, has faced legal problems and allegations of mismanagement that are unrelated to James Biden.
But recent filings in ongoing legal proceedings, along with new accounts provided to POLITICO by former executives of Americore and others, point to potential pitfalls for the former vice president, painting the fullest picture to date of James Biden’s health care dealings and the ways in which they allegedly related to his older brother. In 2017 and 2018, James Biden was embarking on a foray into health care investing, telling potential partners, including at Americore, that his last name could open doors and that Joe Biden was excited about the public policy implications of their business models, according to court filings and interviews with James’ former business contacts.
Tom Pritchard, a former Americore executive familiar with the business’ finances, told POLITICO that James Biden’s arrival exacerbated Americore’s financial problems. Holding out the promise of a large investment from the Middle East based on his political connections, James Biden introduced Americore’s founder to his older brother and helped land a bridge loan to Americore from a hedge fund, Pritchard said. But then, Pritchard said, James Biden received a six-figure personal loan out of Americore’s coffers while encouraging the firm to take on greater financial liabilities. The cash infusion from the Middle East never arrived, and, Pritchard says, James Biden has not paid back the loan, the terms of which are unknown.
“It was all smoke and mirrors,” Pritchard said.
Meanwhile, Americore found itself increasingly hamstrung by high-interest loans and unable to pay employees and vendors, a situation that disrupted the operations of the rural hospitals it owns.
Now, the business is in bankruptcy court, and federal authorities are circling.
David Randolph Smith, an attorney for James Biden, declined to comment.
A Biden campaign official said that Joe Biden never discussed Americore with his brother or expressed support for the business. The official said that Americore’s founder, Grant White, purchased a ticket to a September 2017 fundraiser for the Beau Biden Foundation, an event attended by Joe Biden. “If the two interacted in any way, it would have been a handshake and nothing more,” the official said.
The messy politics surrounding the business dealings of Biden’s relatives, and President Donald Trump’s efforts to exploit them, have loomed over the presidential contest for several months, damaging both camps. Trump’s failed attempts to pressure Ukraine’s government to announce an investigation of Biden and his son, Hunter, led to Trump’s impeachment. Though Trump was acquitted by the Republican-controlled Senate, polls showed that a plurality of Americans consistently supported the impeachment, which highlighted evidence that Trump abused his power for partisan political ends. At the same time, a recent POLITICO/Morning Consult poll found that 57 percent of voters believe Hunter Biden’s well-compensated position on the board of a Ukrainian energy firm amounted to a scandal, compared to 19 percent who do not.
Over the course of Biden’s run, reports have trickled out about James, a sometimes business partner of Hunter’s, who has received financial support from people with an interest in influencing Joe and been repeatedly accused of trading on Joe’s clout to advance his business ventures.
Biden has defended his son Hunter and said that his relatives’ business dealings have had no connection to his official duties. But the recent developments related to James Biden’s health care ventures demonstrate that as long as Biden remains in the campaign, the issue of his relatives’ financial dealings is likely to remain as well.
Even before the development surrounding Americore, James Biden’s venture into health care investing has been surrounded by legal allegations and claims that he invoked his brother’s clout.
Last year, two medical services firms jointly sued James Biden and his business partners in federal court in Tennessee, alleging James and his partners promised to provide a large investment from the Middle East, then pushed the firms to make expensive acquisitions, as part of a scheme to drive them out of business and steal their business models. As previously reported, those firms alleged that James Biden cited his family’s political connections and promised his older brother would promote their health care model as part of his 2020 presidential campaign.
Another health care firm sued Platinum Global Partners — a Florida corporation that lists James and his wife Sara as managers — in Palm Beach County in June. The firm, which makes an oral rinse with applications for cancer patients, alleged that Platinum reneged on an agreement to invest in it and requested that Platinum turn over documents related to the Biden Cancer Initiative, a nonprofit founded by Joe Biden to fund medical research. An executive involved in litigation against James Biden previously told POLITICO that, on a call, James said he could get the Biden Cancer Initiative to promote the oral rinse.
The Tennessee case is ongoing. The Palm Beach County case was dismissed without prejudice in November.
James Biden and his partners have denied the central allegations in both cases.
But, in interviews, former executives of Americore offered additional, similar accounts of James Biden invoking his brother’s influence and the promise of investment funds from the Middle East that never materialized in order to push their firm to grow quickly, taking on new financial liabilities.
Unlike those other firms, Americore is now in the sights of the Justice Department.
The precise nature of James Biden’s relationship to the firm — founded by White, a Canadian investment banker, in 2017— is contested.
The plaintiffs in the Tennessee case described him as a principal of Americore and entered a business card identifying him as such into evidence. James Biden has disputed that he is a principal of the firm in court proceedings, though he has not detailed the precise nature of his ties to Americore,which owns hospitals in Pennsylvania, Arkansas and Missouri.
Pritchard and the other former Americore executive, who spoke on condition of anonymity out of fear of retaliation, each said James Biden was actively involved in the company during their tenures there. “Jim was operating as a principal or Jim was portraying that,” Pritchard said. “Whether on paper he had any ownership, I’m not 100 percent sure.”
Pritchard said James Biden first became involved with Americore in 2017, offering to use his political contacts to help the firm land business and investments. “He could get us in front of the unions. He could get us in front of certain people in government. He could get us in front of the right people,” recalled Pritchard, who said he was skeptical of plans to involve James Biden in the firm.
A former employee at Pineville Community Hospital in southeastern Kentucky, which was acquired by Americore in 2017, said she got the impression that James Biden was in a top leadership role at Americore when he visited the facility and introduced himself in early 2018.
The other former Americore executive — who left the firm after less than a year over concerns about its business practices that were unrelated to James Biden — recalled that James spoke regularly of the ways in which Joe Biden’s presidential aspirations could benefit the firm, and vice versa. “His brother was very interested in rural health care and very interested in veterans’ health care, and it was something he really wanted to get behind,” the former executive recalled James Biden saying. “This would help his brother get elected if it were to take off and go.”
Both former executives recalled James Biden said he would help facilitate a multimillion-dollar investment from the Middle East.
Pritchard said the exact source of the funds was never made clear to him. “That linkage was supposed to come via Jim Biden via whatever influence he had through his brother in the Middle East,” said the other former executive, who worked for Americore in 2018.
The plaintiffs in the Tennessee case allege James Biden and his partners aimed to solicit investments from the state-owned Qatar Investment Authority and met in West Palm Beach with representatives of the Turkish conglomerate Dogan Holding. James Biden and his co-defendants denied the allegation about the Qatar Investment Authority and acknowledged meeting with Dogan.
The former executives also said that James Biden began to set up an office on the second floor of Americore’s headquarters in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. “It was like a little shrine to him and his brother and [former President Barack] Obama,” recalled Pritchard, who said he clashed with James Biden over James’ requests to be reimbursed for pricey furniture for the office.
The other former executive said that when he saw the office, several framed photos of the Biden brothers and foreign dignitaries sat on the floor, ready to be hung on the walls.
The former executives also described James Biden’s role in soliciting financing for Americore.
Pritchard said James Biden arranged a bridge loan to Americore via his business partner Michael Lewitt’s hedge fund, the Third Friday Total Return Fund.
But Pritchard said he learned that after Americore received the bridge loan, it made a six-figure loan to James Biden for his personal use.
Lewitt declined to comment, but referred to a letter he sent the Ellwood City Ledger blaming White’s alleged use of high-interest loans for Americore’s problems and vowing to restore the firm’s finances and operations.
Several Americore entities are currently in the midst of federal bankruptcy proceedings, providing a glimpse into their finances.In February, one of those entities, Americore Health LLC, filed a schedule of assets that included $650,000 due to accounts receivable. Pritchard said that figure referred to the loan repayment owed by James Biden.
Pritchard said that after James Biden received his loan payment from Americore, James reduced his involvement with the firm as its financial difficulties mounted.
“Jim needed to lay low because his brother was possibly running for president, and he didn’t need any bad press,” Pritchard recalled, saying that after James stepped back, Lewitt asked to review Americore corporate documents to ensure they did not bear James’ name.
The other former executive said that not long after he first saw the office being set up for James Biden in mid-2018, the office was emptied out.
Meanwhile, Americore’s problems have increasingly spilled into public view.
BEIRUT (Reuters) – Lebanon announced it cannot meet its debt payments and halted a March 9 bond payment of $1.2 billion on Saturday, setting the heavily indebted state on course for a sovereign default as it grapples with a major financial crisis.
In a televised address to the nation, Prime Minister Hassan Diab said foreign currency reserves had hit a “critical and dangerous” level and were needed to meet basic needs. He called for “fair” negotiations with lenders to restructure the debt.
The default will mark a new phase in a crisis that has hammered the economy since October, slicing around 40% off the value of the local currency, denying savers free access to their deposits and fuelling unemployment and unrest.
The crisis is seen as the biggest risk to Lebanon’s stability since the end of the 1975-90 civil war.
“How can we pay creditors abroad when the Lebanese cannot get their money from their bank accounts?” Diab said. “Our debt has become greater than Lebanon can bear, and greater than the ability of the Lebanese to meet interest payments.”
The long-brewing crisis came to a head last year as capital inflows slowed and protests erupted over decades of state corruption and bad governance.
“We are paying the price for the mistakes of the past years. Must we bequeath them to our children?” Diab said.
The Lebanese had “lived a dream that was a delusion as though things were just fine, while Lebanon was drowning in more debt”, he said.
There has been no sign of a bailout from foreign states that aided Lebanon in the past. Western governments insist Beirut first enact long-delayed reforms to fight waste and corruption.
Diab was appointed in January with backing from the Iran-backed group Hezbollah and its allies. Former prime minister Saad al-Hariri, a traditional ally of the West and Gulf Arab states, stayed out of the government.
NOT PRODUCTIVE ENOUGH
Diab, a little-known academic when he became prime minister, said corruption had drained the state while also criticizing economic policies adopted since the war. Lebanon was importing 80% of its needs and was not productive enough, he said.
He took aim at a banking system that drew capital to the country with dollar interest rates five to 10 times greater than those offered abroad.
“We do not need a banking sector four times the size of our economy. We will have to come up with a plan to restructure the banking sector,” he said.
The gross public debt has reached around 170% of gross domestic product, meaning Lebanon is close to being the world’s most heavily indebted state, he added.
Citing the World Bank, Diab said more than 40% of people could soon find themselves under the poverty line. Lebanon has a population of around 6 million, including about 1 million Syrian refugees.
Lebanon has a total of some $31 billion in dollar bonds that sources told Reuters on Friday the government would seek to restructure.
A set of Lebanon’s bond holders are to step up efforts to form a creditor group in the coming days, one of the members of the group said.
“From what we understand the government wants to be reasonable and so do most creditors. They understand the country is in a difficult situation,” the member said.
Lebanon’s public debt is worth about $89.5 billion, with around 37% of that in foreign currency.
Lebanon has sought technical but not financial assistance from the IMF, though many analysts believe that the only way for the country to secure financial support would be through an IMF program.
“Watch now if bondholders can block any deal,” said Nick Eisinger, principal, fixed income emerging markets at Vanguard, which holds some Lebanese debt but has been underweight in the market for a long time.
“It’s unclear how quick they can go down the restructuring route or get a deal because they need reforms first or at the same time,” he said.
Banks began restricting cash withdrawals and transfers abroad four months ago. Diab indicated the controls could soon be standardized, saying a draft law would “regulate the relationship between the banks and their customers, for it to become more fair and just”.