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The owner and a senior employee of a Boston construction company are facing charges they lied about the company’s safety record before a pair of its employees were killed on a downtown construction site in February.

Laurence Moloney, 57, the owner of Atlantic Coast Utilities, is facing three counts of perjury, while Atlantic Coast Utilities employee Konstantinos Kollias is facing one perjury charge, the Suffolk County District Attorney Rachel Rollins’ office said in a statement.

The pair allegedly made false statements to city officials about the company’s safety record in 2019 and 2020 when filing paperwork as party of Boston’s construction permit process, according to the statement.

Two Atlantic Coast Utilities employees, 27-year-old Castaneda Romero and 33-year-old Figueroa Gutierrez, were killed on Feb. 24 when a dump truck hit them and knocked them into a 9-foot-deep trench the company had dug as part of utility work on High Street in downtown Boston.

The company is also facing $1.3 million in penalties for 28 workplace safety violations in connection with an Occupational Safety and Health Administration investigation into the incident.

Rollins’ office said the dump truck driver was not criminally liable for Romero’s or Gutierrez’s death, but the investigation had turned up several violations of a city ordinance requiring companies doing construction work to attest to their safety records when filing for construction permits. The ordinance was passed after a fatal trench collapse in the South End in 2016 that resulted in manslaughter charges against the owner of the company involved, Kevin Otto.

DA: Construction Firm Lied About Record Before Fatalities

by Banker & Tradesman time to read: 1 min
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