A second person has pleaded guilty to federal charges related to lying on tax filings as part of a nearly 4-year-old bid-rigging investigation of the New York Power Authority.
Peter Shine, of Orangeburg, pleaded guilty to one charge of lying on an individual income tax return in 2014 for the tax year 2013, according to court documents filed this month with the U.S. District Court in the Southern District of New York.
Shine ”“ the owner of a construction company, the name of which was withheld in court documents ”“ reported that he earned $6,934 in taxable income, which “substantially understated” how much he made, according to prosecutors.
There is no mention in court documents or publicly available lists of the Power Authority’s contractors that Shine had a contract with NYPA. However, the state inspector general’s office in a Dec. 3 press release said Shine”™s guilty plea is the second stemming from an investigation of contracts awarded by the state power agency headquartered in White Plains.
In June, Thomas Delaney, owner of Over Rock LLC, a masonry, landscaping and snow removal company in Rockland County, pleaded guilty to two felony charges of falsifying an income tax return and scheming to defraud the Power Authority.
Delaney, of Valley Cottage, was awarded a five-year, $3 million contract by the Power Authority on Oct. 29, 2009 to do masonry, snow removal and landscaping, according to court documents filed in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.
Federal prosecutors alleged that Delaney conspired in the fraud scheme with two unnamed people, one a Power Authority employee at the time of the conspiracy and the other a former Power Authority employee. The latter person approached Delaney to submit a bid in September 2009, which Delaney was awarded by the other alleged co-conspirator, according to prosecutors.
To compensate the co-conspirators for awarding him the multimillion-dollar contract, Delaney was instructed to “submit false and fraudulent certified payroll statements and invoices from Over Rock to NYPA which included requests for payment at the prevailing wage rate for individuals who performed no services on behalf of Over Rock at NYPA,” according to court documents.
Prosecutors said about 195 false invoices were sent to the Power Authority between December 2009 and August 2012.
A Power Authority spokesman declined to say whether the employee identified as a co-conspirator in the fraud still works in the roughly 35-person procurement office in White Plains or in any position at NYPA.
The charges against Shine and Delaney emerged from an investigation of “bid rigging, fraud and tax-related offenses in the award of contracts at NYPA”™s facility in White Plains,” according to the state inspector general’s office. A Power Authority spokesman said the agency was notified in 2012 of the investigation by the office of New York State Inspector General Catherine Leahy Scott.
That investigation has since been taken over by the antitrust division of the U.S. Department of Justice, assisted by the state inspector general, Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Internal Revenue Service criminal investigation unit. A spokesman for the Justice Department declined to comment on the investigation.
State and federal investigators said the Power Authority is cooperating with the investigation.
Delaney faces a maximum of 20 years in prison and a $250,000 fine for the fraud conspiracy offense and faces a maximum of three years in prison and a $100,000 fine for the false tax return offense. He was scheduled to be sentenced Dec. 4.
Shine faces a maximum of three years in prison and a $250,000 fine for filing a false tax return. His sentencing is scheduled for June 17, 2016.
