MONTGOMERY, Alabama — Three current and former executives at a shipbuilder that builds ships for the U.S. Navy and Coast Guard have been charged with accounting fraud after they were accused of falsely inflating the company’s reported profits, federal prosecutors said.
Craig Perciavalle, 52, Joseph Runkel, 54, and William Adams, 63, all of Mobile, Alabama, where Austal USA LLC is based, are accused of misleading shareholders and investors. They each face one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and wire fraud affecting a financial institution, five counts of wire fraud and two counts of wire fraud affecting a financial institution, the U.S. Department of Justice said in a news release Friday.
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Court records were not immediately available to show whether the men had attorneys who could speak on their behalf.
Austal USA LLC is a subsidiary of Australia-based Austal Limited and builds littoral combat ships for the Navy. The vessels are designed to operate in shallow coastal waters.
Perciavalle resigned as President of Austal USA in 2021 after federal and Australian authorities conducted investigations into practices going back more than four years, the company said at the time. Adams is the former director of the littoral combat ship program, according to the SEC. Runkel is the head of financial analysis.
Prosecutors alleged the three men tampered with an accounting metric to hide growing expenses to maintain and increase the share price of Austal Limited shares, hurting US investors.
The US Securities and Exchange Commission said in a press release that the three “were involved in a plan to artificially lower by tens of millions of dollars the cost estimates for the completion of certain shipbuilding projects for the US Navy.”