“Don’t ask me.”
That’s what Joe Gosline said he was told when he inquired in 2004 about how CDR Financial Services went from scoring in the lower half of a group of companies that bid on a lucrative state bond contract to being recommended for the job, according to a weekend article in the Albuquerque Journal.
The claims of Gosline, a former controller and chief financial officer for the New Mexico Finance Authority, deepen the mystery about how the company won the contract — which is, of course, the subject of a federal grand jury investigation into allegations of pay to play in the Richardson administration. The grand jury is asking whether CDR received the state investment contract that paid almost $1.5 million in exchange for $110,000 in contributions to two of Gov. Bill Richardson’s political action committees and his 2006 gubernatorial re-election campaign.
Gosline has a wrongful termination lawsuit pending against NMFA, the Journal reported. He was fired in 2007 for allegedly sending sexually explicit e-mail and visiting Internet dating sites while at work — allegations he denies.
Regardless, he was one of two NMFA employees listed on a March 10, 2004 memo recommending the hiring of CDR, a memo written by then-Chief Financial Officer Keith Mellor. But Gosline says there’s much more to the story.
“Gosline said he ‘wasn’t pointing fingers at anyone’ but said he never recommended CDR,” the Journal article states. “Gosline said he had talked to Mellor after the original scoring and both agreed that CDR had placed in the ‘middle to the bottom’ of the firms that submitted proposals. Gosline said he asked Mellor about the change in the ranking and was told something to the effect of, ‘Don’t ask me how the scoring got like this.’”
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