O∞cial in VA project to testify in Cleveland case Examine documents, a timeline and the costly features of the Aurora VA hospital.
The national supervisor of the bungled Department of Veterans Affairs hospital in Aurora gave confidential construction planning documents to a VA employee in Cleveland who now faces a corruption conviction for passing the information on to a contractor, court documents show.
Chris Kyrgos, the VA’s former national acquisition director, has been subpoenaed to testify in the trial of Mark Farmer, an architect accused by federal prosecutors of paying a former high-ranking VA official in Cleveland for the sensitive construction information.
Farmer, 55, of Arlington, Va., is on trial in Akron, Ohio, on charges of conspiracy, racketeering, embezzlement, theft of public money, mail fraud and wire fraud.
He is accused of conspiring with former VA official William Montague from 2010 through 2013. Montague was head of the Cleveland VA Medical Center from 1995 through 2010 and acting director of the Dayton VA Medical Center from March 2011 though December 2011.
Prosecutors say Montague had a side consulting business he named the “House of Montague.”
Montague was able to obtain from Kyrgos confidential construction planning documents he then sold to Farmer, federal prosecutors state.
The documents helped Farmer’s firm, CannonDesign, to win the design work for a new VA hospital in West Los Angeles, according to prosecutors.
Prosecutors said Montague obtained the information without disclosing to VA employees his true reasons for requesting the records and information. He also did not disclose he was sharing the information with a contractor, according to the government.
The documents Kyrgos provided included a construction monitoring report, a schedule of engineer staffing on VA projects and information on energy upgrades to existing facilities, court documents show.
Kyrgos is identified as one of two VA employees who provided confidential VA construction documents to Montague, which Montague then passed to Farmer. Kyrgos’ name was redacted in most of the documents, but one e-mail from Montague attached as an exhibit in a court filing was not redacted and identified him.
Neither Kyrgos nor the other VA employee who supplied Montague the information are accused of any wrongdoing by government prosecutors.
But the information Kyrgos provided to Montague was supposed to remain confidential and should not have been provided to the contractor because it gave the contractor an unfair advantage when bidding on projects, according to the prosecutors.
Montague has pleaded guilty to 64 corruption-related charges. In a plea deal he agreed to testify during Farmer’s trial.
Prosecutors said the Farmer trial stems from an eight-year corruption investigation that included thousands of hours of wiretap recordings.
As VA’s national director of acquisitions, Kyrgos played a critical role in the department’s half-finished Aurora hospital project, which has run a billion dollars over its budget.
He helped select the project’s design team, and he personally rejected a detailed proposal negotiated between contractor KiewitTurner and VA project site leaders, contending it was riddled with potentially costly caveats.
That caused an impasse broken by a 70-word handwritten agreement obliging the VA to provide a design that could be built for $604 million.
In a successful lawsuit, the contractor alleged that the VA never met that obligation.
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