More criminal charges filed in South Carolina’s nuclear plant failure
A second high-ranking employee of Westinghouse Electric is facing criminal charges in connection with the multi-billion dollar failure of the doomed SCANA nuclear project in Fairfield County.
Jeffrey Benjamin, a former Westinghouse senior vice president of new plants and projects, faces multiple counts of fraud, according to an 18-page indictment made public Wednesday afternoon in U.S. District Court in Columbia.
Benjamin is the fourth person to face criminal charges in connection with the SCANA scandal. The three others — a former Westinghouse employee and two top SCANA officials — have all agreed to plead guilty to various counts of fraud but have not yet been sentenced.
The indictment against Benjamin means that he plans to plead not guilty and will stand trial, where numerous government witnesses — including the two SCANA officials and the one Westinghouse official who have pleaded guilty — could testify against him.
Westinghouse was the contractor on the high-profile nuclear project, which SCANA worked on in partnership with public utility Santee Cooper, which held a minority interest in the project. The project failed in July 2017, and the federal investigation began shortly afterward.
Already, 2 former top SCANA officials -- CEO Kevin Marsh and his number two executive Stephen Byrne -- have agreed to plead guilty to fraud-related charges and likely face prison time.
Earlier this year, another Westinghouse official, Carl Churchman, who oversaw the construction of the project, agreed to plead guilty to lying to an FBI agent about what he knew about the progress of the project.
Building two nuclear reactors had been one of the state’s largest construction projects ever.
But delays and cost overruns eventually doomed the effort, making it one of the largest business failures in South Carolina history. The failed project spawned some 20 lawsuits by ratepayers and SCANA shareholders, as well as federal criminal and civil fraud charges. Nearly 4,000 construction workers were laid off.
The failure also led to the collapse of SCANA, once one of the state’s crown business jewels with 750,000 electric customers and 350,000 natural gas customers, and its 2019 acquisition by Dominion Energy, a Virginia-based utility giant.
From the conception of the project, in 2008, SCANA had hired Westinghouse, a Toshiba-owned company that had experience building nuclear reactors, to oversee construction at the nuclear facility in Fairfield County. Westinghouse was to build two nuclear reactors for a cost estimated at that time to be about $10 billion.
This is a developing story. Check back for details.
