World Trade Center Builder Guilty of Fraud for Creating Fake ‘Minority Owned’ Businesses
11th August 2016
As a condition of $1 billion worth of contracts from the New York Port Authority to build the One World Trade Center, Larry Davis, CEO of DCM Erectors, was required to work with minority- and women-owned businesses. The companies Davis claimed to work with were fake.
“The construction work awarded to Davis came with the obligation to employ minority and women-owned businesses, an obligation that Davis shirked and then lied about,” Preet Bharara, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York said. ” We cannot allow major public projects – particularly ones on the sacred World Trade Center site – to be built on a foundation of fraud.”
Whenever such political set-asides exist, people are going to try to game the system; and they don’t feel guilty about it because they have no relevance to the actual quality of the work being done, merely to cronyism on the part of those in control of the project.