More than 13 months after the Anaheim City Council voted to nix a $320 million deal to sell Angel Stadium because of a burgeoning corruption scandal involving the city’s former mayor, an investigative firm hired by the city has completed a report outlining potential misconduct and pay-to-play schemes.
JL Group, the company handling the report, was expected to deliver its findings to the Anaheim City Attorney’s Office on Monday, the Orange County Register reported, although the full findings will not be available to the public. A redacted version is expected to be released later this summer.
“It’s all being handled with a lot of secrecy,” one resident activist told the paper. “The public paid for the report. The public pushed for the report to begin with.”
Council members have said they can’t release the full findings because of potential employee privacy rights violations. Officials have said they plan to use the findings as a basis to consider new city ethics policies.
The investigators’ findings could bring new ramifications to one of the highest-profile real estate corruption scandals to hit OC in years. Before the allegations against former mayor Harry Sidhu surfaced, the City of Anaheim had been in talks with Arte Moreno, the owner of the Angels MLB team, to sell the city-owned stadium and surrounding parking lots for $320 million. Moreno and his firm, SRB Management, had plans to develop the 150-acre site, which is located in OC’s desirable Platinum Triangle area, into a new district with offices, shops, hotels, restaurants and more than 5,000 homes.
But the City Council quickly nixed the deal after revelations surfaced that the FBI had alleged in a court filing that Sidhu was playing dirty by slipping the Angels confidential information related to the pending deal in exchange for an expected $1 million campaign donation. The FBI was also probing deeper corruption in the city, with one agent writing in a court filing that the city was “tightly controlled by a small cadre” of business and political leaders.
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When the news of the investigation broke Sidhu resigned. He has not been criminally charged and his attorney has maintained he’s not guilty, the Register reported.
Earlier this year Moreno, who has a lease to play in Anaheim through 2029, said he was planning to meet with the city’s new mayor but declined to comment on the potential for a new stadium purchase and development deal.