Water pipe supply company pays $350K fine in corruption case

Staff and wire report

A Billings water pipe supply company created by former state legislator Tony Belcourt has paid a $350,000 fine for a scheme to defraud the Chippewa Cree Tribe.

MT Waterworks pleaded guilty in May to criminal charges that it claimed an Indian ownership preference to get federal and tribal contracts. The contracts include more than $3.3 million from the Chippewa Cree Tribe for work on a federally funded water system project.

U.S. District Judge Brian Morris imposed the fine during the company's Sept. 15 sentencing hearing in Great Falls.

Federal prosecutors said Belcourt took a majority ownership in MT Waterworks, giving it preference in bidding on projects at Rocky Boy’s Indian Reservation, with $100,000 in federal stimulus money embezzled from the water system project.

Belcourt was sentenced to 7½ years in prison and ordered to pay $667,000 in restitution for accepting bribes and kickbacks in awarding tribal contracts.

Money embezzled in a complex scheme involving multiple tribal officials and Havre and Laurel residents came from sources including federal disaster money intended to rebuild the Rocky Boy tribal clinic that was destroyed in flooding and from stimulus money and other money allocated to build a regional water project.

The Chippewa Cree Construction Company, which Belcourt headed at the time of the embezzlement, originally was created primarily to head construction of the water treatment plant at Tiber Dam and to put in the pipelines for the water project.