Puerto Rico disconnect

[Phil1111 910]

The Lineman Got $63 an Hour. The Utility Was Billed $319 an Hour.

SAN JUAN — The small energy outfit from Montana that won a $300 million contract to help rebuild Puerto Rico’s tattered power grid had few employees of its own, so it did what the Puerto Rican authorities could have done: It turned to Florida for workers.

For their trouble, the six electrical workers from Kissimmee are earning $42 an hour, plus overtime. The senior power linemen from Lakeland are earning $63 an hour working in Puerto Rico, the Florida utility said. Their 40 co-workers from Jacksonville, also linemen, are making up to $100 earning double time, public records show...

But the Montana company that hired the workers, Whitefish Energy Holdings, had a contract that allowed it to bill the Puerto Rican public power company, known as Prepa, $319 an hour for linemen, a rate that industry experts said was far above the norm even for emergency work — and almost 17 times the average salary of their counterparts in Puerto Rico...

The Army Corps of Engineers, which is overseeing power restoration in Puerto Rico, did not hire Whitefish because its prices were more than double what the agency considered reasonable, according to the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs....

Prepa agreed to pay Whitefish three times the going rate for aviation fuel, and about double what a helicopter specially equipped for transmission line construction should cost, according to industry insiders and people with knowledge of the Whitefish contract. The company is also billing about $4,000 an hour to rent a helicopter; companies that specialize in transmission line construction said that price is more than double what they charge...

Jacksonville Electric Authority said it had billed Whitefish for additional overhead to cover things like administrative costs and insurance, bringing the bill to about half what Whitefish was charging Prepa. A spokeswoman for Jacksonville Electric said she was not concerned about the markup because Whitefish was also handling food and lodging. (However, Whitefish is also charging Prepa another $412 a day per worker for food and lodging.)..

In Puerto Rico, the reaction was more harsh and skeptical. Mr. Rodríguez, the former utility worker, says out loud what many critics say privately: that markups like those have been used in the past to pay kickbacks to corrupt officials...

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/12/us/whitefish-energy-holdings-prepa-hurricane-recovery-corruption-hurricane-recovery-in-puerto-rico.html

[billvon 2,393]

I am shocked! No one could have foreseen that a crony government contract, with a clause that the government cannot audit them, could be defrauding anyone!