Legal News

Sen. Stevens: ?Thanks for All the Work on the Chalet . . .?

By Dan Slater

Thank you notes can count for a lot. But how much? Ted Stevens is going to find out. Today, Bill Allen, the former CEO of Veco Corp., testified against Stevens about renovations made to Senator Stevens’s Alaska home, though it’s not clear, based on early reports, how strongly Allen’s testimony supports the prosecution’s case.

Stevens is facing charges that he accepted and failed to report more than $250,000 in gifts — including home renovations — from Veco, an oil-services company. Find LB background here, here and here.

According to the WSJ, when prosecutors asked Allen on several occasions whether he billed Stevens for work Veco performed, Allen said he didn’t, though he acknowledged receiving thank-you notes from Stevens in which the senator indicated that he needed to pay for the renovations. Here’s another report on Allen’s testimony from the Miami Herald.

In one note, Stevens wrote, a bit cryptically, “Thanks for all the work on the chalet. You owe me a bill. . . It just has to be done right.”

Allen, however, said another friend of Stevens, who also was involved in the project, approached him later and told him not to worry about billing Stevens. “Ted’s just covering his a**,” Allen remembered the friend saying. Allen went on to tell jurors that he “didn’t really want to” charge Stevens for the work, “because I wanted to help Ted.”

Allen reportedly explained his legal troubles to the jury — he pleaded guilty last year to paying more than $400,000 in bribes to public officials in Alaska — and acknowledged that he may get a shorter prison sentence for assisting the government’s public corruption investigations. He also said federal investigators promised “not to mess with my kids” if he cooperated.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on October 01, 2008 (boomark / email).