Skanska's Shady History Uncovered As Local Businesses File Lawsuit Against Global Corporate Giant

Via America’s Lawyer: Construction giant Skanska faces a litany of lawsuits related to its Pensacola Bay Bridge which was put out of commission by Hurricane Sally. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss more.

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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

Recently, our hometown, Farron in our hometown, was rocked by the negligence of a company called Skanska. And I think people need to understand how Skanska, a company like Skanska affects towns all over America. Give me the story about Skanska and let's draw some parallels between how people react to local politics, would you.

Right. Well, well right here in our town with Skanska, you know, we just had hurricane Sally came through. They're building a bridge for us. It's the only way in and out of that town at the moment, unless you want to take a two hour detour. They didn't secure their barges that they're using to build the bridge, the barges get loose, they smack into the bridge, they break it. It's no longer operable. The barges then get washed up into other areas, more destruction.

They were in peoples, people's backyards.

Right. And so Skanska says, or Skanska says, yeah, we're, you know, sorry, but, oh well. Not much we can do. And so we decided, well, well, who is this company? And we look into it and we find out that not only have they been doing similar negligent projects across the United States, they have been found internationally to be paying bribes, to be paying off cartels. I mean, this is an international company.

Okay. Fraud.

Yeah.

Bribery, interaction with cartels, so they can pull off their business. This, this is a, this is a, they're make, bring in $18 billion a year. It's one of the biggest construction companies on the globe. They happen to be in Sweden, but they got offices all over the United States. This is the new norm. Skanska is the new disgusting norm. And what's so bothersome about Skanska, is it never should have happened here in Pensacola.

Right.

Why did it happen? How did, how is it that they had public hearings where Skanska is standing up saying, we want to build your bridge. One, it's one, it's a huge bridge, it's a three, three mile bridge across a massive waterway. And so they stand up, we can do this for you. And oh, by the way, you know, we're going to be the low bidder and oh, by the way, when you evaluate how they came, as far as, as far as their evaluation in the process of saying, is this the company, or should we, or these other two companies, the company. When they go through that evaluation process, these people on the bottom, of almost everything.

Yeah.

And so, so, but why did it happen? How did it happen?

It happened because, you know, we got to admit here, we weren't paying attention.

Right.

And not just we as a community, but, but we weren't either.

We, me, me and you, we weren't. We weren't.

But, there, there were these meetings.

Yeah.

The city council meetings, the town hall meetings, the things that we think of, oh, no, that's something people did in the forties. No, they talk about this kind of things. They talk to whoever shows up and they say, this is the company we're leaning towards. Does anybody have any objections, any problems with this? Anything we should look at? But because most people think that activism is only on a national scale.

Right.

You've to show up at the latest protest, or you got to vote against Trump. No, it's all local. Politics starts locally.

Right.

And if we get more involved locally, it's going to have the impact that we want to have nationally.

Okay. We, we should have been at the meetings.

Yes.

Where they had public meetings. We are in the business of news. We could have found out about the frauds. We could have found out about the bribery. We could have found about the failures, where people are killed because they're, they're, they're building process was so awful that people were actually killed. There was a bridge that collapsed down in Orlando.

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