A power plant built in Afghanistan by a pair of well-connected contractors may be sitting idle despite a year of warnings from government watchdogs.
The Tarakhil plant, which sits just outside Kabul, had drained $335 million in taxpayer funds before an avalanche in Afghanistan hampered its operation even further, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction revealed Thursday.
Constructed by Black & Veatch and Louis Berger Group, the power facility produces just 2 percent of the power it was intended to generate, according to the inspector general for the U.S. Agency for International Development.
Louis Berger’s work has fallen under scrutiny in the past. During former Secretary Hillary Clinton’s tenure the State Department, the company’s CEO was indicted for siphoning money from USAID reconstruction contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The company was allowed to continue its work with the agency despite the fraud, and remains one of USAID’s top contractors.
Louis Berger and other top firms have relied on a lobbying firm founded by John Podesta, the man who now chairs Clinton’s campaign, to fight reforms that would have cut back on contracts to big development players like itself.
The Podesta Group lobbies for the Council of International Development Companies, of which Louis Berger is a member. But Podesta’s ties to businesses, like Louis Berger, that continued to win lucrative State Department contracts under Clinton despite records of failure have raised additional questions about the way political influence was used to enrich well-connected companies during Clinton’s tenure.
In July 2012, Podesta was named to a United Nations panel that was called to come up with “development goals” that would ultimately be implemented by the very corporations his family’s firm represented.
Among the CIDC companies is Chemonics International, a Washington-based development company, has long been a preferred USAID contractor.
Chemonics thrived during Clinton’s tenure, nabbing more contracts during the Haiti reconstruction effort than any other company. Peter Schweizer noted the extensive Clinton connections to development failures in Haiti in his book, Clinton Cash.
Cheryl Mills, Clinton’s then-chief of staff, was the “point person” for USAID’s response to the Haiti earthquake, Politico reported in 2013.
Former President Bill Clinton was named co-chair of the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission, a fund established shortly after the earthquake to develop a plan for the millions flowing into Haiti.
That position essentially gave Bill Clinton oversight of the projects his own charity was helping to propose and fund.
“The system was set up so that decisions on doling out contracts and projects went through the Clintons,” Schweizer wrote.
For its part, Chemonics continued to win lucrative USAID contracts despite its record in Haiti. In February 2011, the firm won an $88.5 million contract to boost employment in Afghanistan.
The project was intended to create 300,000 jobs. By September 2013, Chemonics had created just 2,458 jobs in the embattled country, according to USAID’s inspector general.
USAID officials were “not confident that project funds were properly accounted for,” a March 2014 report revealed.
In May 2009, Chemonics won an $89.8 million contract to grow exports and employment in the Pakistani economy. The USAID inspector general found “no measurable increases in sales or employment” after the first two years of the project.
The Tarakhil Power Plant and numerous unsuccessful projects in Haiti highlight another arena in which Clinton used her diplomatic perch to provide certain companies with generous opportunities.
