Here’s a tasty little morsel buried in the background paperwork prepared for the Honolulu Ethics Commission’s meeting this past week.
…the Commission has 17 open and interrelated investigations involving 2 departments, 7 subjects and 45 – 50 witnesses. The investigations have absorbed hundreds of hours of investigative work over the last 10 months. However, it will likely take six months to conclude the investigations.
That’s huge. Seventeen interrelated investigations involving seven employees or officials and two different city departments.
I would guess that it’s hard to keep something like that secret. With so many people involved along the way, there have to be tales making the rounds in the city.
Sounds like a scandal ready to go public, doesn’t it?
Could the city administration’s foot dragging on ethics have something to do with these investigations?
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Perhaps the new no-transparency policy stems from internal concerns over leaks about these investigations before they’re completed.
Yes.
Who stole my stapler? Alert the Ethics Commission.
Yes.
next step in the manual: someone must come up with a hare-brained argument to justify it all. then communicate it through the PR tube.
Speaking of scandals, SA today linked to a short AP story about a former government official from Samoa being sentenced to two years in federal prison for taking bribes from a Hawaii company.
http://www.staradvertiser.com/news/breaking/20150627_ExAmerican_Samoa_official_sentenced_for_taking_bribes_from_Hawaii_company.html?id=310386731
Left unsaid was whether any action is being taken against the alleged briber, the Native Hawaiian Holding Company.
Said company is registered to a Waimanalo address and the president is listed as one KANAHELE, DENNIS K.
It seems the Samoa government filed suit against this company more than a year ago, alleging fraud, etc.
http://www.samoanews.com/content/en/asg-files-4m-lawsuit-against-native-hawaiian-holding-co
The Justice Department states that this all relates to Samoa’s administration of a $24 million federal grant to assist Samoa recover from the devastating 2009 tsunami, and that the person who made the illegal payments to the former Samoa official, one Quin Rudin, “has been prosecuted separately for a scheme to defraud Cisco Systems Inc., and its subsidiary Cisco Systems Capital Corporation, related to the lease of Cisco equipment. Rudin’s case is pending in the Northern District of California.”
http://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/former-american-samoa-government-official-sentenced-22-months-prison
DOJ indicates there was a two-year investigation by the FBI in Honolulu and San Francisco.
Perhaps some media attention to the Hawaii end of this saga is long overdue.
What about the investigation of the campaign finance ethics violation by Richard Fale?
It seems he has been made head of a Republican party group now and his wife too. These investigations take however long they take I guess, but he could be running for some office again in 2016. The violation was quite clear; PAC money from father-in-law , the Treasurer at the PAC… Hawai’i Solutions. This is a jail-time offense. Just wondering.