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Tuesday, June 6, 2000



Witnesses offer testimony
about Ewa Villages
payments

By Gordon Y.K. Pang
Star-Bulletin

Tapa

Requests for Ewa Villages relocation payments stopped in July 1997 after officials began requiring additional oversight.

That was the testimony given yesterday by Michael Hansen, city chief of the Internal Control Division, during the prosecution's case against fired city worker Michael Kahapea.

Prosecutors said Kahapea was the ringleader behind a scheme that bilked some $6 million from a fund established to help relocate commercial firms from Ewa Villages.

Hansen testified that it was Kahapea and the now-deceased Norman Tam, the city's fair housing officer, who gave all the answers when he and other members of the Internal Control Division met with housing officials to review relocation practices.

Following the meeting, Hansen said, "we determined that there needed to be the involvement of the Purchasing Division in the bid process."

From 1993 through July 1997, there were requests for $6.2 million in payments for more than 170 moves, Hansen said.

'There were a few other companies
that had submitted bids and those
few companies never
got any work.'
Michael Hansen
INTERNAL CONTROL DIVISION

Tapa

Hansen, under questioning by Deputy Prosecutor Randal Lee, then testified that his office knew of no other claims for relocation involving Ewa Villages.

Lee is arguing that Kahapea forged the relocation claims and then had the city-issued checks forwarded to friends and family who set up bogus moving companies.

Hansen said his agency began its investigation in June 1997 after Housing Department employee Michael Shiroma approached him about irregularities in the bidding process for relocation companies.

"Unusual from our perspective was that there were very few people getting all of the work," Hansen said.

Only five companies, he said, ever got work for commercial relocations from Ewa Villages: Titan Moving and Hauling, RJ Hauling, Special Pacific Builders, American Hauling and A-1 Hawaii Trucking.

Lee is contending that the companies were either not relocation companies or were bogus, and that they were paid for work not done or done at inflated costs. Officials with all five companies were indicted in the case.

"There were a few other companies that had submitted bids and those few companies never got any work," Hansen said.

The first arrests in the case were made in October 1998.

Also yesterday:

(PI) Kahapea secretary Evelyn Pang, under cross-examination, testified that the payment claims submitted by the companies in question were signed or initialed not only by Kahapea, but by his colleagues or superiors.

(PI) Former Ewa Villages commercial tenant Stanley Fong said he received a cashier's check for $10,000 from Titan Hauling and Moving, a company unknown to him. The company had submitted to the city a claim for, and received $23,390 for moving Fong's company, Stan's Welding, to Campbell Industrial Park. Fong said he moved his own company to Sand Island.

(PI) Daniel Yoshida, principal of Konawaena High School, said he "loaned" high school classmate Kahapea $20,000 and then an additional $10,000. Calvin Ma, a city building inspector, said he gave Kahapea between $35,000 and $50,000 as part of an "investment." Both men indicated they have not been paid back fully.



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