Elite Criminality Enabled by the DOD?

Here's a company with sketchy qualifications
getting million dollar contracts from the DOD
and then committing fraud at the tax payers'
expense. Consequently, instead of prosecuting the
company, seizing their profits/assets and refunding
the U.S. taxpayer, the government only suspends
them from further contracts. Unbelievable!

Doesn’t this smell of a “business as usual for
the elite” drug smuggling/laundering enterprise
fronting as a weapons supplier?

Supplier Under Scrutiny on Arms for Afghans

excerpt summary:
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This week, after repeated inquiries about AEY’s performance by The Times, the Army suspended the company from any future federal contracting, citing shipments of Chinese ammunition and claiming that Mr. Diveroli misled the Army by saying the munitions were Hungarian.

As part of the suspension, neither Mr. Diveroli nor his company can bid on any further federal work until the Army’s allegations are resolved. But he will be allowed to provide ammunition already on order under the Afghan contract, according to internal military correspondence

Public records show that AEY’s contracts since 2004 have potentially been worth more than a third of a billion dollars. Mr. Diveroli set the value higher: he claimed to do $200 million in business each year.

Several military officers and government officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the investigations, questioned how Mr. Diveroli, and a small group of men principally in their 20s and without extensive military or procurement experiences, landed so much vital government work.

“A lot of us are asking the question,” said a senior State Department official. “How did this guy get all this business?”

To be accepted, the company had to be, in Army parlance, “a responsible contractor,” which required an examination of its financial soundness, transport capabilities, past performance and compliance with the law and government contracting regulations.

Both the Army and AEY have treated the sources of the ammunition the company purchases as confidential matters, declining to say how and where the company obtained it, the prices paid or the quantities delivered.

But records provided by an official concerned about the company’s performance, a whistle-blower in the Balkans and an arms-trafficking researcher in Europe, as well as interviews with several people who work in state arsenals in Europe, show that AEY shopped from stocks in the old Eastern bloc, including Albania, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Kazakhstan, Montenegro, Romania and Slovakia.

Some arsenals contain ammunition regarded in munitions circles as high quality. Others are scrap heaps of abandoned Soviet arms.

The Army’s contract did little to distinguish between the two.

NATO rules require ammunition to be tested methodically over its life.

The Soviet Union, which designed the ammunition that AEY bought, developed similar tests, which are still in use. But when the Army wrote its Afghan contract, it did not enforce either NATO or Russian standards.

It told bidders only that the munitions must be “serviceable and issuable to all units without qualification.”
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