Carl Churchman, a former Westinghouse official, pleaded guilty after lying to federal officials in a case related to the $9 billion failed South Carolina nuclear project. Churchman is not the first utility executive to be prosecuted by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for South Carolina.
Read more at the Post and Courier.
“Churchman’s May 21 plea deal provides the first concrete evidence that investigators with the FBI and U.S. Attorney’s Office for South Carolina are targeting the project’s lead contractor, Westinghouse, in addition to S.C. utility executives who continued bankrolling the doomed project with ratepayers’ money.
The plea deal requires Churchman, Westinghouse’s top official at the Jenkinsville construction site from May 2015 to October 2017, to cooperate with investigators and potentially testify against other utility executives and construction managers who led the project.
The effort to add two nuclear reactors at the single-reactor Midlands plant was supposed to create thousands of jobs and usher South Carolina into a clean, nuclear-powered future.
Instead, its sudden collapse left millions of South Carolinians on the hook to pay billions of dollars more on their power bills for a pair of reactors that never generated a watt of electricity.
Behind the scenes, cost overruns, construction delays and supply-chain dysfunction had crippled the project for years. But utility executives misled the public, lawmakers and state regulators to believe the V.C. Summer venture would come online in time to meet crucial deadlines, prosecutors have said.
Churchman faces five years in prison and a $250,000 fine after lying to investigators in May 2019, court filings show. He also might have to pay restitution.
Prosecutors have already secured guilty pleas from Kevin Marsh, the former president and CEO of SCE&G’s parent company, and his second-in-command, Steve Byrne. Both men admitted to defrauding ratepayers by lying to cover up the project’s poor performance right up until the end. They have agreed to cooperate as witnesses in the ongoing state-and-federal investigation.
Before Churchman’s plea deal, prosecutors had hinted their investigation would not stop with utility executives like Marsh and Byrne. Churchman’s agreement appears to underscore a new focus on other players in the project, including lead contractor Westinghouse.
Reached by phone Monday, Westinghouse spokeswoman Sarah Cassella said, “We do not have any comment as it’s part of ongoing legal action.”
An FBI agent interviewed Churchman on May 21, 2019, nearly two years after SCE&G and Santee Cooper abandoned the project, court documents show.
During that interview, Churchman falsely told the agent he had no involvement in reporting the project’s estimated completion dates to SCE&G in February 2017, according to the plea deal.
In truth, emails showed Churchman had communicated with his Westinghouse colleagues about the viability and accuracy of those estimated completion dates. Then Churchman reported those dates to SCE&G and Santee Cooper during a Feb. 14, 2017, meeting — just a few months before the project’s collapse — the plea deal states.”