Union Bank of California has provided the city of Beaumont access to financial records needed to determine how former city officials spent hundreds of million of dollars in city bond funds.
On March 1, the City Council voted to issue legislative subpoenas to compel the bank to release the records or face further legal action. A bank spokesman has said Union Bank is cooperating with city officials.
About 15,000 pages were copied at the bank’s offices in Los Angeles on Wednesday and Thursday and the city is redacting confidential account numbers, so the records can be made public, City Attorney John Pinkney said in an email.
Pinkney said the records are needed for the city to complete its investigation into how bond funds were spent.
The Los Angeles bank acted as the trustee when the city issued more than $270 million worth of bonds over a period longer than 20 years to build waterworks, sewers, streets, parks and other amenities.
As trustee, the bank processed thousands of expenditure requests from former city officials, including requests that appear central to a corruption probe.
In April 2015, district attorney’s investigators, with the help of the FBI, seized thousands of pages of documents at Beaumont City Hall, the city manager’s home, and the offices of Urban Logic Consultants, a firm that for more than 20 years provided the city’s economic development and public works directors as contract employees.
The city manager, Alan Kapanicas, and William Aylward, the city’s longtime finance director, left City Hall shortly after last year’s raids. No charges have been filed in the case.
In November, the State Controller’s Office found that the city’s accounting controls were “effectively nonexistent,” making it impossible to know whether hundreds of millions of dollars had been spent for their intended purposes.
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