Top Westinghouse official indicted – again – in six-year SCANA nuclear scandal

Jeffrey Benjamin, the top Westinghouse official who supervised billions of dollars of construction at SCANA’s ill-fated nuclear construction site north of Columbia, has been re-indicted by a federal grand jury on charges connected to a cover-up of impending financial disaster at the project.

Benjamin is charged with conspiracy, wire fraud, securities fraud and causing the failure to keep accurate corporate records of one of South Carolina’s largest construction projects ever, a failed $9 billion effort to build two nuclear reactors in Fairfield County at the V.C. Summer nuclear site.

Those are the essentially the same charges Benjamin was originally indicted on in 2021 and re-indicted in a superceding indictment earlier this year by a federal grand jury.

But federal Judge Mary Geiger Lewis ruled in August that the most recent indictment was unlawful because prosecutors had not scrubbed that grand jury of all persons who might have been biased against SCANA, meaning the utility’s former ratepayers. SCANA, parent company of South Carolina Electric & Gas Co., had for years added a surcharge onto the monthly power bills of its hundreds of thousands of ratepayers to pay for the ongoing costs of the doomed project.

Lewis said Benjamin’s right to a fair trial was violated because he was entitled to be indicted by a fair and impartial grand jury.

Had that 2021 indictment not been nixed, Benjamin had been scheduled to go to trial in October in Greenville.

Now, any future trial will take months, if not more, to begin.

Benjamin’s attorney, William Sullivan of Washington, DC, said in a statement, “We are of course aware of the government’s recent new indictment filed after the dismissal of the previous one, and continue to evaluate it on behalf of Mr. Benjamin.”

The U.S. Attorney’s Office issued no statement on the new indictment, which was quietly filed Nov. 14 with no media announcement.

Like the old indictment, the new one is 18 pages and contains the same information:

Benjamin is a former Westinghouse executive with the title of senior vice president of new plants and major projects, with responsibilities for his company’s construction of nuclear reactors worldwide.

SCANA and Santee Cooper, South Carolina’s two major electric utilities who were building the new nuclear reactors, contracted with Westinghouse in 2008 to oversee the nuclear construction site in Jenkinsville, about 30 miles north of Columbia. Benjamin oversaw the project’s crucial phases.

“As construction problems mounted, costs rose, and schedules slipped, the defendant (Benjamin) and others hid the true status of the project,” the indictment said. “Through intentional and material misrepresentations and omissions, the defendant... deceived the owners, regulators, and investors in order to maintain cash flow and liquidity for Westinghouse.

“The defendant’s misrepresentations and omissions, as well as the associated cover-up, resulted in billions of dollars of losses to the owners and investors,” the indictment said.

SCANA was an investor-owned corporation whose shares were publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange. Publicly-traded companies such as SCANA are required by law to release accurate information about events that can affect their stock prices.

Santee Cooper is a state agency.

Benjamin knew “that SCANA was a public company” and had an obligation to live up to its public financial reporting requirements, the indictment said.

SCANA was under pressure to finish the project by the end of 2020 so it would qualify for $1.4 billion in federal tax credits.

But, “from the outset, the project was characterized by substantial delays and cost overruns,” the indictment said.

Benjamin and other Westinghouse officials informed SCANA and Santee Cooper about progress on the project, upbeat information that he knew was false, the indictment said.

Westinghouse fired Benjamin in March 2017, and the two South Carolina utilities abandoned the nuclear project in July 2017. An FBI investigation began shortly afterwards.

The abandonment threw more than 4,000 construction workers out of work and caused SCANA’s publicly-traded shares to begin to fall. Because of its resultant financial problems, SCANA — once one of South Carolina’s most respected companies — was later bought by Dominion Energy, a Virginia multi-state energy company.

In 2016 and early 2017, Santee Cooper and SCANA paid Westinghouse more than $450 million for its work on the project, the indictment said.

Two former SCANA top executives — CEO Kevin Marsh and chief operating officer Stephen Byrne — pled guilty to fraud and were given prison terms in connection with the cover-up. Marsh received two years in federal prison and Byrne, 15 months.

In October, Judge Lewis gave six months’ home detention to a top Westinghouse construction official, Carl Churchman, for lying to an FBI agent during the federal investigation into why the V.C. Summer project failed.

In 2017, as the project was on the verge of failing, Churchman helped SCANA make public rosy projections of the project’s completion dates, although he knew those dates were unrealistic, according to evidence in the case.

Churchman is expected to testify at any trial involving Benjamin.