David H. Wright, Bribery, California 2024

Los Angeles, California - Former head of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP) David H. Wright has agreed to plead guilty to a federal criminal charge for accepting bribes from a lawyer in exchange for his official action to secure a three-year, $30 million no-bid LADWP contract for the lawyer’s company.

According to the plea agreement, Wright, 62, of Riverside, will plead guilty to a one-count information charging him with bribery, a crime that carries a statutory maximum sentence of 10 years in federal prison.

The information and Wright’s plea agreement were filed today in United States District Court. Wright is expected to make his initial appearance in this case on December 10.

Wright served as LADWP’s general manager from September 2016 until July 2019, when he resigned at the direction of the mayor of Los Angeles. In this role, Wright was the chief executive of the largest municipal utility in the United States.

During 2016 and 2017, Wright developed a relationship with Paul O. Paradis, 58, of Scottsdale, Arizona, a lawyer appointed by the Los Angeles City Attorney’s Office to represent LADWP in a lawsuit in which the department blamed the vendor of its billing system for the misbilling of hundreds of thousands of ratepayers.

By early 2017, Wright and Paradis agreed that — in exchange for Wright’s support of a “no-bid” $30 million contract for Paradis’s downtown Los Angeles-based company Aventador Utility Services LLC — Paradis would give Wright a million-dollar-per-year job as Aventador’s CEO and a luxury company car once Wright retired from LADWP.

The LADWP board approved the $30 million no-bid contract in June 2017, without knowing of Wright’s agreement with Paradis to take a lucrative job as Aventador’s CEO upon retiring from LADWP.

Wright, who is cooperating with the ongoing investigation, faces up to 10 years in federal prison for his role in the bribery scheme.

Source: https://www.justice.gov/usao-cdca/pr/former-head-ladwp-agrees-plead-guilty-bribery-charge