TX officials allegedly engaged in bribes & kickbacks to make millions building Trump's border wall

[kpete]

Texas officials allegedly engaged in bribes and kickbacks to make millions while building Trump's border wall

A local official in Hidalgo, Texas, cajoled company executives to hire a firm owned by his family in exchange for a cut of lucrative construction contracts, an investigation from ProPublica and The Texas Tribune found.
Claims against that official and his family were made last year in a lawsuit by the county.
The kickback scheme started during a discussion at a steakhouse near the US-Mexico border in Texas.

The kickback scheme was allegedly hashed out over weeknight drinks at a steakhouse in a border county in south Texas.

Amid surf and turf and expensive scotch, a Hidalgo County official said he would meet with contractors in the clubby confines of the restaurant in a strip mall in McAllen.

There, Godfrey Garza Jr., director of the county’s drainage district, cajoled company executives to hire a firm owned by his family in exchange for a cut of lucrative construction contracts, according to new documents filed in state district court in Hidalgo County.

The target of the plan: a $232 million project funded by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the county to build a border fence and rehabilitate aging dirt levees along the Rio Grande.

The previously unreported details of Garza’s alleged scheme emerged last week in an ongoing lawsuit in which the county has sued companies owned by Garza, his wife and their two sons for fraud during the construction of the combined levee-fence. The new filings also implicate one of Texas’ most powerful engineering firms, Dannenbaum Engineering, as a participant in the scheme.




MORE:
http://www.businessinsider.com/texas-official-allegedly-took-bribe-when-hiring-border-wall-contractor-2018-2

[CrispyQ]

1. Any infrastructure bill will be the same.

Our government is corrupt & the rot is happening even faster under Trump.

[dewsgirl]

2. Much like the PR Whitefish contract. The

Corruption in this administration is breathtaking.

[shraby]

3. Surprise, surprise. What else is new?

Isn't that what the wall is all about? How much is the donald slated to skim?

[EricMaundry]

4. Team Russia is inside our government and stealing everything they can get their hands on

[procon]

5. No one has yet to explain how Trump will pay for the private land to build his wall.

Only a small section of the border route (less than 2 miles?) is in a wilderness preserve on federally owned land. Everything else is privately owned land. These are homes, farms and ranches, businesses and towns, that will be cut off from roads and water, even their own property, if Trump gets his way.

The congress didn't include it in the legislation, so where is the money to buy all this land? Where is the money to fight all the resulting lawsuits from the land owners who don't want to give up their property rights?

[mopinko]

6. back when a cheato presidency* was still just a nightmare, i said

the thing that scares me are the wolves that will rush into the greatest leadership void in the history of this country.
it gives me no joy to be right.

[tblue37]

7. That's also how Trump plans his taxpayer infrastructure investments to go--into

corrupt private pockets.

[eppur_se_muova]

8. Mission accomplished.

Graft is what Uglican "infrastructure" money is really about.

[lindysalsagal]

9. And this will never make the msm because 45 can't govern. U.S. in freefall.

And his voters couldn't be happier.