Santos Eliazar Rivas was sentenced in the US District Court, Baltimore, Maryland, to 12 months of home detention and 24 months of probation. The sentencing follows his September 2011 guilty plea to three counts of making false statements involving highway projects funded in part by Federal Highway Administration. Rivas, the former director of quality control for Frederick Precast Concrete, Inc. (FPC) was also ordered to pay restitution in the amount of US$131,410.
Precast concrete supplied by FPC included structures for drainage used in construction schemes involving the Woodrow Wilson Bridge and the I-70/Baltimore National Pike project. Rivas' duties included overseeing the manufacturing of the company's precast products and ensuring the company's compliance with state regulations.
The investigation by the Office of Inspector General (OIG) at the US Department of Transportation disclosed that FPC's products delivered to federally-funded project sites failed to conform to state-approved specifications. Certain structures contained the wrong number and/or type of steel rebar pieces in their frames; others contained unapproved substitutions of wire mesh in place of steel rebar. The OIG said that accordingly none of these structures conformed to state-approved specifications, and all of them were materially weaker than if they had been produced according to design.
The investigation further disclosed that Rivas had signed off on shipping tickets listing precast structures whose concrete mix either had not been tested at all, or had been tested and failed to reach the required strength. Based on the shipping tickets that he falsely certified on behalf of FPC, the Maryland State Highway Administration paid three prime contractors US$131,410 for the deficient materials, who in turn, paid FPC.
