Ex-SCANA executive sentenced to prison for role in VC Summer nuclear fiasco

Stephen Byrne, a former top executive at what was South Carolinian’s giant electric utility SCANA, was sentenced Wednesday to 15 months in federal prison, hit with a $200,000 fine and a $1 million restitution payment for a crime connected to the now-defunct company’s multibillion-dollar V.C. Summer fiasco.

Byrne, 63, had earlier pleaded guilty to criminal conspiracy, a charge that meant he conspired with others to hide the extent of cost overruns and other malfeasance at the proposed V.C. Summer nuclear plant in southern Fairfield County, which from 2015 on was far behind schedule.

Byrne’s conviction and looming prison sentence was yet more proof of SCANA’s downfall from a prestigious New York Stock Exchange market darling and South Carolina business icon to failed company due to criminal conduct — not mismanagement or incompetence.

“This is a huge fraud, a huge fraud,” said U.S. Judge Mary Geiger Lewis, ticking off the damages to SCANA’s shareholders and others whose long-held company stocks tanked after the company announced it was giving up the project in July 2017 after spending billions of dollars in construction costs at the plant site.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Winston Holliday told the judge that the sentence might appear light. But Byrne, he said, aided the government considerably by being the first to give himself up and provide information against other wrong-doers.

Information Byrne gave the government about others’ wrongdoing was of the highest quality and was “extremely valuable,” Holliday said.

“I’ve never seen anybody who took notes like he did,” he added.

Holliday also said prosecutors had come to believe that Byrne’s main motivation was to build a good nuclear plant.

“He was not motivated to fill his bank account,” Holliday said. “As an engineer, he wanted to build this thing.”

Final ex-SCANA official sentenced to prison

Byrne is the last of the former SCANA executives to be sentenced to prison.

In federal court in Columbia Wednesday, Byrne apologized for his actions, saying he had failed at building nuclear plants, and in so doing failed the nuclear industry in general and everyone who depended on SCANA’s work to be successful.

Byrne said he had meant for the V.C. Summer site “to be the crowning achievement of my life, but I failed.” Byrne said it was not just his failure, but said he let down all those who had depended on the project’s being a great success.

He said he regretted not sounding a warning earlier about troubles at the V.C. Summer site.

Byrne’s lawyer, Jim Griffin, said his client is now unemployable in the nuclear industry but has found meaning in working for Habitat for Humanity. Byrne also provided information that helped resolve numerous civil suits against SCANA, suits that led to repayments to SCANA’s customers.

In 2021, another former SCANA top official, former CEO Kevin Marsh, also pleaded guilty to criminal conspiracy charges linked to the cover-up of the real problems at the nuclear site. He was sentenced in February 2021 to two years in prison and a $5 million fine.

Byrne and Marsh were accused of hiding the company’s perilous financial condition in the years around 2015 due to cost overruns and other problems at the nuclear site. To have revealed the real conditions would have not only put the project in jeopardy, but threatened the price of the company stock, which was well-regarded at that time.

An official from the nuclear construction arm of Westinghouse Electric Corp., which was hired to oversee and manage the building up of the nuclear site, also was snared by an FBI investigation into questionable financial activities at the site.

In June, 2021, former top Westinghouse official and site project director, Carl Churchman, pleaded guilty May 2021 in federal court to making a false statement to an FBI agent during its investigation of the failed nuclear project.

Churchman falsely told an FBI agent that he was not involved in communicating how the project was going to SCANA officials.

In fact, Churchman — who was managing the project for Westinghouse — was communicating “with colleagues from the Westinghouse Electric Corp. through multiple emails in which they discussed the viability and accuracy of (completion dates) and thereafter, he reported those dates to executives of SCANA and Santee Cooper during a meeting held on Feb. 14, 2017,” according to a charging document in his case.

In October, Byrne is expected to be a witness against another former top Westinghouse official, Jeffrey Benjamin, who is also charged with fraud in the failure of the V.C. Summer plant. Benjamin is accused of helping to hide major workplace problems from 2015 to 2017 at SCANA’s nuclear plant construction project at the V.C. Summer site in Fairfield County.

SCANA, a Fortune 500 publicly traded company whose business lineage traced back to 1846, was one of the crown jewels of South Carolina’s economy.

But the failure of its overpriced, bungling effort to build two nuclear reactors at its plant in Jenkinsville led to multiple lawsuits and mounting financial troubles. Eventually the company was absorbed by Dominion Energy.

SCANA’s downfall is perhaps the most costly business failure in state history.

As problems mounted at the construction site in southern Fairfield County, Byrne became part of a conspiracy that engineered a cover-up to hide the extent of the publicly traded company’s financial problems caused by the nuclear project’s difficulties, according to charging documents in his case.

“Through intentional misrepresentations,” Byrne and others deceived regulators and customers, documents said. In so doing, Byrne and the others kept the stock price inflated and the investors in the dark.

In a court filing seeking leniency by Byrne’s attorneys Griffin and Maggie Fox, they wrote his “cooperation has been indispensable in helping authorities understand the full story of what happened at V.C. Summer and what led to the decision to abandon” the project in July 2017.

Byrne’s cooperation led Marsh’s guilty plea, Churchman’s guilty plea and the pending 16-count indictment against Benjamin, they wrote. And it also led to an agreement by Westinghouse to pay $21.25 million and cooperate in the government’s ongoing investigation, Byrne’s lawyers wrote.

“Mr. Byrne has learned a harsh lesson from this investigation and prosecution, which have rendered him effectively unemployable in the nuclear industry, placed great stress on his marriage, and ruined countless professional and personal relationships he has built over the course of his life,” the filing said.