Canadian military contractor sentenced in multimillion-dollar Africa fraud

The U.S. military has two battles it’s fighting in Africa, Assistant United States Attorney Mark Pletcher said Friday in San Diego federal court. One is against extremist groups such as Boko Haram and al-Shabaab, and one is to win the “hearts and minds” of the African people.

So when a building in rural Africa constructed by a U.S. military contractor falls down, or wind blows its roof off, “the opposition uses it as propaganda,” Pletcher said.

That’s what happened on multiple occasions — at an aircraft hangar in Niger, a shooting range in Senegal and a school in Togo — due to fraud perpetrated by a U.S. military contracting company and its CEO, Micheline Pollock, according to a plea agreement.

Pollock, a Canadian who pleaded guilty in October to one count of conspiracy to defraud the United States, was sentenced Friday by Chief U.S. District Judge Dana Sabraw to time served after being in custody since September 2020. She was also ordered to pay nearly $7.2 million in restitution.

Sabraw said that while Pollock and her company had done “amazing” contracting work for the military in Afghanistan, that changed when the company expanded to Africa.

“You cut corners (and) it snowballed to outright fraud,” Sabraw told Pollock. “That damages the reputation of the United States.”

According to her plea agreement and sentencing documents, Pollock was CEO of Dover Vantage Inc., a construction company incorporated in the U.S. with headquarters in Dubai. After launching the company in 2009, the company completed several projects in Afghanistan, where Pollock, a former member of the Canadian Army Reserves, had previously spent time working for nonprofits promoting women’s rights.

In 2011, the company began bidding on jobs in Africa, winning 22 construction contracts with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers over the next seven years for military and humanitarian projects.

“But work on civilian projects in remote areas of Africa proved far more challenging than operating on Western military bases” as the company had done in Afghanistan, Pollock’s defense attorneys wrote in a sentencing memorandum.

That’s when the fraud conspiracy began, Pletcher argued Friday during Pollock’s sentencing. “It may have started with cutting corners,” Pletcher said, but ultimately advanced to “out-and-out fraud … on project after project, year after year.”

The conspiracy lasted from at least September 2011 to February 2018, according to the plea agreement, and included submitting fraudulent quality-control documents, concrete strength tests and material certification records.