Contract cheat Sarah Lee Mitcham faces US court action

Update: Regular readers of this blog will recall my articles (on 6,12 and 13 Jan 2011) about Sarah Lee Mitcham, a US defence contractor, who skipped out of Afghanistan while absent-mindedly 'forgetting' to pay her Afghan contractors the millions of dollars she had received from the US government to pay them.
I notice that one of those contractors, namely Jalal-Uddin Saeed, of Associates in Development, has now issued proceedings against Mitcham (or Lee, as she is sometimes known) in the US District Court for Northern Texas, Dallas Division for fraud and breach of contract, demanding $2 million he says he is owed.
The 26-page complaint says Mitcham and her co-accused "committed the worst kind of war profiteering seen in Afghanistan". They also undoubtedly had an impact on US Army counter-insurgency programmes, souring relations between the military and Afghan communities and probably leading to further deaths and injuries to American soldiers.
"Once the defendants received the benefit of the work from these companies they submitted invoices for payment to the US government (or the prime contractor). After receiving payment, they wrongfully kept the money amounting to at least $5 million and refused to pay the Afghan companies. In early 2010, defendants fled Afghanistan with millions rightfully belonging to the Afghan companies." 
The complaint alleges that after leaving Afghanistan the Afghan contractors were told via email that Sarah Lee Mitcham had committed suicide.
In addition, Mr Saeed says that he risked his life to support NATO, against the wishes of many in his village. When he was unable to pay his workers, he and his family were forced to flee in order to save their lives. Mitcham, whose last given address is 104 Hoyt Clark Rd, Many, LA 71449-6022, is known to use at least 13 aliases. She has allegedly filed for bankruptcy protection. It is still not clear what action, besides barring her from applying for further contracts, the US Army intends to take against Lee and her associates.

SIGAR boss goes out with a bang

The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), General Arnold Fields, appears to be going into overdrive in his last few weeks in the job. After being criticised for little activity, he has published his second report in a week.
Like the previous report (see below) the most recent offering concerns reconstruction funds that may be at risk due to lack of planning.
This audit of the Commander's Emergency Response Program (CERP) in Laghman found that 27 of the 69 CERP projects in the province, worth $49.2 million out of a total budget of $53 million, were at risk or have questionable outcomes.
The CERP program is basically a large pot of cash that military officers can dole out locally for humanitarian and reconstruction projects without having to go through the tiresome business of tenders and all that. Since 2004 Congress has appropriated nearly $2.64 billion for CERP projects in Afghanistan.
What the SIGAR report has found out is that most of the money spent so far has gone on road contracts, but there appears to be no money in the pot to pay for maintenance, meaning the roadways may simply revert to tracks in a few years. "“Our audit found that these projects and groups of related infrastructure initiatives were approved without adequate assurance that the Government of Afghanistan had the resources to operate and maintain them. This suggests that the Afghans have not been sufficiently involved, despite a U.S. strategy emphasizing Afghan First,” said General Fields, who visited Laghman in September last year. "Building multimillion dollar projects, and then trying to figure out a sustainability plan, is a nonsensical way of planning," he added.
Is it possible that General Fields is trying to prove a point, now he has been sacked from his job?
In his final report to Congress, issued today, Fields notes that there are 16 ongoing audits in his office. The Investigative Directorate opened 35 new cases and closed seven bringing the total number of ongoing cases to 105. At present 86 per cent of current investigations are focussed on contract or procurement fraud. Presumably this includes the case of the lying, cheating Sarah Lee Mitcham of Bennett-Fouch and K5 Global, who I have written about before and who left Afghanistan last year without paying her local contractors.

How to find Sarah Lee (Mitcham): Step 3

A quick check on a commercially available database confirms that Sarah Lee (b. 4 Nov 1965) also uses the aliases: Sarah Hel Mitcham, Sarah L Mitcham, Sarah Murrell Mitcham, Sarah Helen Lee and Sarah H Mitchan. Such a lot of aliases! Albany, Oregon looks like a pretty good bet for her present location.