Hillsborough Schools procurement boss Christopher Farkas accepted a trip this year’s Kentucky Derby from a major vendor to Hillsborough County Public Schools (HCPS), two separate and independent sources have told the Tampa Bay Guardian.
Farkas is the same HCPS top official who also accepted free travel arrangements to the Master golf tournament just one month earlier (in April) from that same vendor, scandal-plagued Horus Construction Services and its president Jonathan Graham.
The Tampa Bay Guardian broke the first news of this ever-widening scandal, where a free private jet trip accepted by Farkas and school superintendent Ayres’ appears to be just the tip of the iceberg of a scandal involving state-wide racketeering in school district construction projects.
Farkas’ formal title is Deputy Superintendent of Operations, but he is in effect and in fact the final decision maker on major procurements. Some of those procurement decisions require school board approval, some don’t.
It was Farkas who also proposed the controversial multi-million dollar real estate swap between HCPS and Horus Construction that the school board approved on May 7th. The Kentucky Derby took place on May 4th, and Farkas’ trip to the Masters was 3 1/2 weeks before the real estate swap.
“Did you attend the Kentucky Derby this year with your wife?” was the question we posed to Farkas via email. We provided him with four additional questions to answer if his answer was “yes” to our first one.
More than 48 hours after our deadline to answer, Farkas still had not responded.
The Guardian has published a series of article about Farkas and school superintendent Ayres’ accepting travel to the Masters on a private jet to provided by Horus, tickets to the Masters tournament, free lodging and much more. Both Ayres and Farkas have consistently not responded to our questions when we have put evidence of their own corruption before them.
However, Ayres claimed at the October 1st school board meeting that his trip to the Masters was a private trip. The school board members had no questions for Ayres about his Masters trip, even though his explanation raised more questions that it answered.
Specifically because of the board’s “fail[ure] to recognize the seriousness of their staff getting big gifts from vendors,” influential local newspaper La Gaceta wrote that these trips “not only deserves their scrutiny, it should be examined by someone in law enforcement”
Ayres also received a free round of golf from Graham at the highly exclusive 200-member Sage Valley Golf Club just northwest of where the Masters is held. A picture obtained by the Guardian shows Ayres walking next to Jonathan Graham, president of Horus Construction, on a fairway at Sage Valley during Ayres’ Masters trip.
Via email, we asked Ayres to “categorically deny that the picture shows you” walking next to Graham on a Sage Valley fairway. As with every request to Ayres or Farkas to categorically deny any evidence or allegations we put before them, they have yet to respond.
Because all corruption allegations in our articles have proven to be substantially true, and because top HCPS officials continue to stonewall, the Guardian has been forced to adopt a unique but unfortunate policy towards HCPS and the school board.
That policy is: we will assume that any and all evidence of corruption or allegations of corruption are true if HCPS officials fail to deny them in advance of publication.
We have repeatedly given Ayres, Farkas and others every opportunity to deny serious allegations and evidence before we publish them, or tell their side of events. However, they continue to not answer.
Public records requests to the Florida Commission on Ethics show that neither Ayres nor Farkas have a required Form 9 for any of the gifts Graham has provided them with.
Ayres and Farkas appears to have a strategy of claiming that this their trips to the Masters and Kentucky Derby were personal trips. They then tell school board members that they reimbursed Graham, while refusing to provide the public records of those reimbursements because…ahem…these were private trips. Trips that were arranged by a major vendor to the agency they work for, a vendor who they also arranged a highly unusual and questionable land deal for within a month of these trips.
Has corruption colonized Hillsborough Public Schools and its board? A whose job it is to exercise oversight over this public agency with an annual budget in excess of $4 billion.
As always….the Guardian reports and the readers decide. Please like our Facebook page to find out when we publish new stories.
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