US firm with corruption record gets $9.8 million Panama contract

Louis Berger the US firm that has been awarded a $9.8 million contract to design the tunnel that will carry  Metro Line 3 under the Panama Canal has been convicted of  corruption, paying bribes and violations of labor rights in the United States, India, Spain, Colombia, Iraq, and Afghanistan reports La Prensa.

The contract is awarded 6 months after the act was published in PanamáCompras and after a series of claims presented by the competitors of the Tunnel of the Americas Consortium.

The Panama Metro reported that the process was carried out under transparency guidelines and that all legal terms were met.

The rejection caused some of the acts of corruption that company executives committed in the past to be disclosed on social networks.

The first corruption headlines involving Louis Berger executives date back to 2010 when two of its top executives pleaded guilty to raising the prices of jobs they did in Iraq and Afghanistan on behalf of USAID.

Then, in 2015, the United States Department of Justice filed a lawsuit against the firm for paying bribes to Indian officials to obtain water supply contracts in the cities of Goa and Guwahati.

Four years later Louis Berger came to the fore after the  US National Transportation Safety Board linked it to the collapse of the pedestrian bridge that was under construction in Miami that caused the death of six people.

In its investigation, the board determined that Louis Berger “was not qualified by the Florida Department of Transportation to conduct a construction review, and said that state agency should have verified Louis Berger’s qualifications.”

Louis Berger has a history in Panama. In 2002, it was hired by the Ministry of Public Works to remove the war material that was detected on the land where the accesses to the centennial bridge would be built, a project where it also participated with the design of the structure.

Between 2008 and 2009, the Panama Canal Authority gave it the task of disseminating the objectives and scope of the construction of the third set of locks to the residents of the communities surrounding Lake Gatún, province of Colón.

In 2011, the design of the Atlantic Bridge was awarded along with China Communications Construction Company.

In 2019, the name of the company made the news when it was awarded the contract to carry out the Environmental Impact Study of the project to recover the beaches in the bay of Panama, a failed project, criticized by civil society.

In  June the company was disqualified from the tender carried out by the Metro to contract the studies for the construction of the metrocable (cable car) in the San Miguelito district. Despite obtaining the best evaluation, the evaluation committee disqualified Louis Berger when a conflict of interest was detected with one of the experts who would participate in the project.

The Metro canceled the tender after all the participants were disqualified.