Top SCANA ex-official to plead guilty to fraud conspiracy in nuclear plant failure

The number two executive of the defunct SCANA Corp. — whose top officials engineered the biggest business failure in South Carolina history: the $10 billion V.C. Summer nuclear plant fiasco — has agreed to plead guilty to criminal conspiracy fraud charges in connection with the nuclear failure, according to a document filed Monday in U.S. District Court in Columbia.

The upcoming guilty plea of Stephen A. Byrne, 60, is a centerpiece of a Monday filing involving his alleged criminal actions. He will need to have his guilty plea formally accepted by a U.S. District Court judge before it becomes official.

Byrne is charged with conspiring to commit mail fraud, the document said.

The document is a motion requesting a stay in a Securities and Exchange civil fraud lawsuit against Byrne and SCANA’s former CEO, Kevin Marsh. That civil lawsuit was filed in February. One big difference between civil and criminal proceedings is that in a criminal proceeding, a defendant can be subject to a prison term.

The document alleges that “through intentional and material misrepresentations and omissions, Byrne and others deceived regulators and customers to maintain financing for the (nuclear) project and to financially benefit SCANA.”

The Monday filing said there is “an ongoing criminal investigation” and indicated more criminal charges against other former SCANA top officials may be in the offing.

“The United States anticipates filing additional criminal charges against other members of the conspiracy,” the document said.

“Given that the same alleged fraudulent schemes are at issue in both the civil and criminal cases, a stay of the proceedings is necessary to protect the United States’ interest in connection with the ongoing criminal investigation and to guard against use of the civil discovery process in ways that might compromise the ongoing criminal investigation,” the document said.

The document, called a “motion to intervene and to stay civil proceedings,” was filed by U.S. Attorney Peter McCoy and the federal prosecutors on the criminal case: Emily Limehouse, Jim May, Brook Andrews and Winston Holliday. The document said that Byrne and his attorney, Jim Griffin, do not oppose the motion.

The stay must be approved by a federal judge.

Byrne, 60, lives in Mt. Pleasant, but he is a former resident of Irmo.

Attorney Griffin, of Columbia, said Monday, “It would be inappropriate for me to comment about an ongoing criminal investigation or Mr. Byrne’s plea agreement until he enters a formal plea in open court before a judge.”

Asked for comment, McCoy, U.S. Attorney for South Carolina, said, “We cannot comment on this specific matter and would rely on the public filings in this case. However, the U.S. Attorney’s Office will continue to protect the citizens of South Carolina from all crimes, be they violent or economic.”

For nearly three years, the FBI and prosecutors with the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Columbia have carried out a confidential investigation into whether there was wrong-doing or simply mismanagement in the collapse of the V.C. Summer nuclear project in July 2017. The filing Monday indicating that Byrne has agreed to admit criminal wrong-doing in the affair is the government’s answer.

SCANA’s failure affected the pocketbooks of hundreds of thousands of people and businesses. For years, the company had jacked up customers’ monthly power bills to help pay the billions in ongoing construction costs for the two nuclear reactors that were supposed to be built, but now will never generate power. The plant has one working reactor now.

For years, SCANA — a Fortune 500 company whose stock gave off a dependable stream of ample dividends to investors and current and retired company employees — was traded on the New York Stock Exchange. It was long one of South Carolina’s preeminent companies, tracing its corporate lineage back to 1846.

Headquartered in Cayce, SCANA had thousands of employees, some 700,000 electric power customers and 350,000 natural gas customers in South Carolina.

Once SCANA and its junior partner in the nuclear project, Santee Cooper, a state-owned electric company, announced they were abandoning the project in July 2017, SCANA’s stock price plummeted and the company’s financial problems mounted. Several thousand workers were thrown out of work at the nuclear project’s Fairfield County site. Many jobs in the local Fairfield County economy that were created around the nuclear project were also lost.

In January 2019, the financially-troubled SCANA was absorbed by the energy giant Dominion Energy.

The document filed Monday alluded to an information — a criminal charging paper against a defendant when the defendant does not contest the charges — and a plea agreement with Byrne.

However, as of 6:30 p.m. Monday, neither information nor the plea agreement had been filed.

This story was originally published June 8, 2020 at 4:34 PM.