Tristan Korringa, Former colleague of Tom DeVocht

Since the day he arrived he was just lying—it’s really to make him look good. And he would just lie and lie and lie until, you know…

TRANSCRIPT:

I first met Tom DeVocht, first time I ever worked with him, was when he was in Clearwater working with construction stuff, and then, then I worked with him on a remote basis because I was running construction you know, across all the continents at the time.

Since the day he arrived he was just lying—it’s really to make him look good. And he would just lie and lie and lie until, you know… And he would do it in such a way that it was believable. It wouldn’t be like a blatant flat-out lie that you know is false. He would do it in incremental things that over time it made it feel like it was believable and that the other person was really the one who was screwing it over.

He started running the construction projects the exact opposite of how you should run construction projects and doing it in a mode called “fast track renovations” whereby you don’t wait for all the planning to get done, you don’t get it properly budgeted. You just plan it and construct it as you go. Which typically triples, 4Xs, 5Xs the construction. It ends up taking longer. You end up spending millions more. And that was his way of doing it. And at that point, I was kind of like, you know, yeah, sure the construction was happening, but it was totally out of control.

Whatever he would do to try to get the thing done, he would do it. And to make him look good. “Hey, look at all these construction things I’m getting done.” Meanwhile, in the background, millions of dollars are being spent, irregularly.

I had the assignment of tallying up all the change orders from one of these projects that he was working on. And it was astronomical. I mean, I can’t tell you how—I don’t even remember how much it was but I was like shocked, myself after I finished that thing—it was—how much more it cost because of all the change orders that got done.

He committed millions of dollars of financial crimes in his tenure and really created a lot of hardship that there’s no surprise about why he left and there’s no surprise about what he’s doing now.

And you’re committing these financial irregularities, you do it against any organization—not even just us, you know. Do it against some other organization—commit so many financial crimes, you’re going to leave and then you’re going to attack. And that’s just the nature of how it works until you come clean. And obviously, he won’t.