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Lockheed Martin pays $4.7 million to settle charges it lobbied for federal contract with federal money
Key Excerpts from Article on Website of Washington Post
Posted: August 30th, 2015
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/federal-eye/wp/2015/08/2...
The worlds largest defense contractor has agreed to pay $4.7 million to settle charges that it illegally used government money. Top executives for Lockheed Martin who were being paid by the federal government to run Sandia National Laboratories ran a fierce campaign to lobby [government] officials for a seven-year extension of their contract, [and] urged them to close the bidding to competition. To clinch the contract extension, Sandia labs officials hired high-priced consultants including Heather A. Wilson, the former New Mexico congresswoman, who allegedly was paid $226,000. Wilson was not just on Lockheeds payroll. From 2009 through 2011, she had consulting jobs for Lockheed and three other contractors managing the Energy Departments national lab, charging taxpayers a total of $450,000. But the contractors could not document her work, said [Energy Department Inspector General Gregory] Friedman, whose staff found that the justification for the billing did not meet even minimum standards for federal payments. Wilson ... left Congress in 2009. Jay Coghlan of Nuclear Watch New Mexico, called the deal a slap on the wrist for the worlds biggest defense contractor to pay, [and] wrote on the NuclearWatch blog Lockheed engaged in deep and systemic corruption, including paying Congresswoman Heather Wilson $10,000 a month starting the day after she left office for so-called consulting services that had no written work requirements.
Note: Lockheed Martin runs a breathtakingly big part of the United States. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles about corruption in government and in the corporate world.
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