School Bus Owners Indicted for Bid-Rigging In Puerto Rico

Puerto Rico Courthouse

News Americas, SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico, Fri. May 22, 2015: Five Puerto Rico nationals are each facing a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison and a $250,000 fine after a federal grand jury in San Juan, returned an indictment charging them with participating in bid rigging and fraud conspiracies at an auction for public school bus transportation contracts in Puerto Rico’s Caguas municipality.

The Department of Justice announced a seven-count felony indictment in U.S. District Court of the District of Puerto Rico in San Juan against five bus transportation company owners: Gavino Rivera-Herrera, Luciano Vega-Martínez, Alfonso Gonzales-Nevarez, José L. Arroyo-Quiñones and René Garay-Rodríguez.

Count one charges the bus owners with participating in a conspiracy to rig bids and allocate the market for public school bus transportation services in the Caguas municipality.  The second count charges the bus owners with conspiracy to commit mail fraud and counts three through seven charge the bus owners with committing mail fraud.  According to the indictment, the defendants and others defrauded, and conspired to defraud, the Puerto Rico Department of Education and the Caguas municipality, among others, in order to fraudulently obtain contracts for school bus transportation services.

These charges relate to a 2013 Caguas municipality auction, at which four-year contracts for public school bus transportation were awarded.  The indictment alleges that the defendants participated in the charged offenses from around August 2013 until at least May 2015.

The bus owners are charged with bid rigging and market allocation in violation of the Sherman Act, which carries a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison and a $1 million criminal fine for individuals.  The maximum fine may be increased to twice the gain derived from the crime or twice the loss suffered by the victims of the crime, if either of those amounts is greater than $1 million.

This is the first case resulting from an ongoing federal antitrust investigation into price fixing, bid rigging and other anticompetitive conduct in Puerto Rico’s school bus transportation services industry.