The disgraced executive who led Carillion before the construction company’s collapse has landed a senior role at a technology firm in Florida, only months after he was banned from being a company director in the UK.
Richard Howson, who received an eight-year disqualification from the Insolvency Service in October, has been named construction president at Tampa-based TECfusions, the Guardian can reveal. The appointment sparked anger among unions and industry experts.
TECfusions builds and renovates datacentres and combined heat and power systems, as well as carrying out projects that repurpose industrial sites.
The collapse of Carillion was one of the biggest failures in UK corporate history. The company employed 12,000 people and was the second biggest construction firm in the UK before it went bust in January 2018 owing nearly £7bn to suppliers and subcontractors.
The construction outsourcer held a clutch of lucrative government contracts, including building hospitals and major road schemes.
Howson was chief executive between 2011 and July 2017 and was seen as one of the chief protagonists in allowing the company to slip into insolvency.
Howson received £1.5m in his final full year of employment in 2016, which included £591,000 in bonuses.
After the company’s collapse, MPs said Howson, along with other Carillion executives, had demonstrated “greed on stilts” and cared more about “fat pay bonuses” than looking out for signs of trouble in the company.
Last year, the Insolvency Service announced the directorship ban for Howson, and said he had caused Carillion to report its financial statements in a way that he ought to have known “falsified and concealed” the reality of the company’s deteriorating financial position.
It also said that he signed off a £54m dividend in June 2017, which he should have known was not in the interest of the company, or its creditors, given its financial position.
Howson started this month at TECfusions, confirming the move to followers on the LinkedIn social network.
Rudi Klein, who was part of the government’s Carillion taskforce set up after the collapse, said the reaction to Howson’s job was likely to be “incredulity” and “anger”.
Klein, previously the chief executive of the Specialist Engineering Contractors’ Group that represented hundreds of firms which lost money after the collapse, said: “The consequences [of Carillion’s collapse] for thousands upon thousands of suppliers were that either they went under themselves, or they lost phenomenal amounts of money.
“They will be appalled, they would have been thinking, ‘OK, that’s it, at least this guy and his colleagues can’t be involved in the management of a company any more’, now they find this out, there will be a lot of anger,” said Klein, now the director of the law firm Kleinlegal.
Jon Richards, an assistant general secretary at the Unison trade union, said: “Public service workers were badly let down by Carillion. They will be astounded to learn that the man at the helm, who is banned from being a company director, is now back running things for a company in the US.
“There is no punishment or resolution if he is simply allowed to fail upwards by crossing the Atlantic and carrying on as if nothing happened.”
According to the company’s website, TECfusions is a “group of world class professionals in the fields of technology, environment and community” that “work together to address immediate real world issues in an environmentally rejuvenate way”.
The Guardian has contacted Howson and TECfusions for comment.
