A Massachusetts district attorney indicted Atlantic Coast Utilities, along with its owner, Laurence Moloney, and an employee, Konstantinos Kollias, for perjury on Nov. 30.
The Wayland, Massachusetts-based contractor allegedly lied on Mattocks-Higgins Affidavits of Workplace Safety, according to a press release from the office of Suffolk County District Attorney Rachael Rollins. The forms were on file when the company secured permits to work on a High Street jobsite in Boston, where two workers were killed in February 2021.
Atlantic Coast Utilities was indicted on four counts of perjury, and Moloney was indicted on three counts. Kollias, an employee, was indicted on one count. The Mattocks-Higgins Affidavits are used to determine any past violations by a company, and whether the company was in the OSHA Severe Violator Enforcement Program.
The district attorney's office alleged that the company, Moloney and Kollias, under pain of perjury, submitted the Mattocks-Higgins Affidavits to the city of Boston claiming that the company had never been cited by OSHA for fines, when in reality it had been issued citations by the workplace safety agency on September 8, 2016, and again on June 3, 2019, according to the district attorney's office.
The company submitted the affidavits four times claiming that it had no history of OSHA violations. Moloney submitted these forms three times, on three separate dates, while Kollias submitted the affidavit on one occasion. Each submission of the form lead to a perjury indictment.
The two workers, Jordy Alexander Castaneda Romero, 27, and Juan Carlos Figueroa Gutierrez, 33, were killed when a dump truck struck and pushed them into a 9-foot-deep excavated trench on the High Street jobsite. OSHA initially fined the company and Moloney $1.3 million. Moloney had repeated violations and a history of evading OSHA fines, according to the agency.
Since 2001, Moloney has been investigated six times and fined an additional 14 times, according to a Department of Labor press release from August. Prior to this February, Moloney had $81,242 in fines, of which $73,542 was unpaid and has been referred to debt collection, according to the release.
