WASHINGTON – A former energy company executive testified yesterday that his employees worked on an expansive reconstruction of the home of Sen. Ted Stevens, who is under investi-gation in a federal probe of corruption among Alaskan lawmakers.
Bill Allen, the former chief executive of Veco Corp., said he personally oversaw the rebuilding of Stevens' house near Anchorage, visiting the GOP lawmaker's home about once a month, and gave the senator furniture. “I gave Ted some old furniture,” Allen testified. “I don't think there was a lot of material. There was some labor.”
Contractors previously told a federal grand jury that Veco executives supervised renovations at Stevens' home and that bills for their work went to Veco for Allen's approval. But yesterday was the first time that Allen, who has pleaded guilty in the bribery of state lawmakers in Anchorage, named Stevens publicly.
Allen testified in federal court in Alaska in the trial of a former state legislator whose case is part of a larger corruption investigation that has ensnared Stevens' son, Ben, a former state senator. Allen said yesterday that Ben Stevens accepted $4,000 a month in bribes, disguised as consulting fees, while he was in the state legislature.
Ted Stevens has said that he paid every bill he received for the home renovation. In a letter to a friend who is a former federal prosecutor, Stevens said he had paid more than $130,000 for the renovations, according to the Seattle Times, which reported on the document.
Yesterday, Stevens said in a statement that he did not want to make any comment that might influence the investigation. “I urge Alaskans not to form conclusions based upon incomplete and sometimes incorrect reports in the media. The legal process should be allowed to proceed so that all the facts can be established and the truth determined,” he said.
Federal investigators have been examining federal contracts awarded to Veco, particularly those from the National Science Foundation in 1999 and 2004. The 1999 contract was worth $45.4 million; the second is worth as much as $93 million through 2011, NSF officials told The Washington Post last month. They said Veco won the contracts after competitive bids to help the agency with research operations in the Arctic Circle.
In July, FBI and Internal Revenue Service agents raided Stevens' home. They spent more than 10 hours there, taking pictures and hauling away unspecified items.
Stevens, 83, is the longest-serving Republican senator. He joined the Senate in 1968 and has become one of the most powerful members of Congress. For six years, he chaired the Appropriations Committee, steering hundreds of millions of dollars to his state.
