The Afognak Village Corporation, with 1,000 shareholders, operates about two dozen companies with nearly 5,000 employees across the United States and overseas.
Its national and worldwide reach with hundreds of millions in contracts grew from subsidiaries that qualify for Small Business Administration contracting preferences with the Department of Defense, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Air Force, the Navy, the Army, the Marines, the Coast Guard and other agencies.
The company describes its shareholders as descended from the village of Afognak, which was on an island just north of Kodiak hit hard by the tsunami that followed the 1964 earthquake.
Its website features 382 job listings from Japan to Alabama and from Guantanamo Bay to Iraq. Afognak ranked 130th of the top 200 federal contractors in fiscal year 2015, according to a Bloomberg analysis, with $406 million in obligations.
The process by which it emerged as a federal contracting heavyweight is at the heart of a whistleblower lawsuit with legal bills in the millions that is slowly progressing in federal court in Alaska.
According to the lawsuit filed by a former company official, Afognak and its wholly owned subsidiary, Alutiiq, LLC, created “sham” companies to become eligible for more federal contracts than allowed.
Keep reading this article at: https://www.adn.com/opinions/2017/04/25/former-native-corporation-exec-alleges-sham-companies-get-government-contracts/
