The city of Portland, Oregon, has awarded an energy contract worth $11.5 million to a woke company run by an ex-convict who has served jail time for scamming companies and tax fraud, according to a report.
City staffers had wanted to give the contract to an established company, one with an 85 percent white workforce, according to The Oregonian.
However, the city council instead chose to award the contract to Diversifying Energy, a newly formed nonprofit organization with black leadership promising “equitable access to clean, sustainable energy” for “low-income communities and people of color.”
Diversifying Energy is run by a 71-year-old woman, Linda Woodley, who has spent two years behind bars for multiple bankruptcies and millions of dollars in fines for tax offenses, the local paper noted.
Woodley also fabricated essential claims in her cover letter, saying she’d “managed” a $30 million energy upgrade program in California — one that has never heard of her, the paper noted.
The city’s officials in a statement said that they didn’t know about Woodley’s criminal records — adding that the $11.5 million contract with Woodley was put on hold pending a review.
“This is obviously shocking and distressing and sad news for us and the program,” Eden Dabbs, the city’s spokeswoman, told The Oregonian.
“We are going to have to take responsibility for the decision. We’ll absolutely be looking at this in terms of process and use it as a painful lesson not to let this ever happen again,” Dabbs said.
In 1997, Woodley was found guilty of bankruptcy and tax fraud after the FBI found out she had diverted close to one million dollars from the companies to her own use, the paper’s investigation showed.
As a result, Woodley was sentenced to three years and a month in federal prison. In 2001, she was sent back to jail for six months after confessing to more than a dozen probation violations, including fudging financial statements, securing prohibited loans to buy a house, and lying to her probation officers multiple times, the paper noted.
In addition to other charges, Woodley has also faced a slew of massive fines for tax frauds, most recently in May in California with an $810,000 lien filed against her in Sacramento County for a failure to pay taxes according to the investigation.
Woodley told the outlet that she hundred percent stood by her claim that she had managed an energy company that has no record of her, insisting that she deserved a second chance.
“People make mistakes,” she told the paper of her initial conviction that she “had hoped … was behind me. I have worked very hard over the past years to be a good person, and I think that I am highly regarded in many circles in the industry,” she said, without mentioning the tax liens filed against her just seven months ago.
