A Towson-based government contracting company, whose founder pleaded guilty earlier this year in a $552.5 million federal bribery case, has been sued by three people who said they weren’t paid for their work on U.S. Agency for International Development programs abroad.
According to three lawsuits filed recently in Baltimore County District Court, Vistant owes each of the foreign aid workers about $20,000 to $29,000 for work they did before the end of January, when the Trump administration froze USAID funding and issued stop-work orders.
Vistant’s founder, Walter Barnes III, of Potomac, is among four men who pleaded guilty in a decade-long bribery scheme involving USAID contracts. He is scheduled to be sentenced in October and faces a maximum penalty of five years in prison, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.
Barnes resigned as Vistant’s president and chairman in 2023, according to federal documents, and the current CEO, George Washington, declined to comment in an email to The Baltimore Sun.
The contractors who sued Vistant are Alanna Shaikh, Amjad Hamza and Noor Majdalani. They say they were not paid for their work and expenses incurred in programs under contract to the company in December and January.
“It’s very clear people we relied on to do good work overseas are being really mistreated,” said Laura L. Dunn, a New York-based attorney representing the plaintiffs. “We’re sort of leaving them twisting in the wind.”
The suits note that the contractors received “stop work” orders on Jan. 27, which they complied with, but then weren’t paid for work and expenses they were already owed. Vistant terminated their email accounts and their access to the timesheet portal, the suits said.
According to one suit, filed earlier this month, a contractor was given less than a week to leave the job and housing in Morocco after the stop-work order, despite Vistant already having paid for the accommodations through June. The lawsuits also involved USAID programs in Yemen and Syria.
Emails from Vistant, included in the suits, show company officials saying they were trying to see how various directives and rulings in lawsuits challenging the USAID cuts would affect reimbursements to contractors. The company said it was reducing costs, cutting staff and expenses, and urged the contractors to be patient. At least one email from a Vistant senior vice president in April said the company had received “some partial payments” for “activity” prior to the stop-work order.
As the months went by and the contractors remained unpaid, their emails reflect growing desperation for the funds.
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“I’m sure you’re aware we’re going through difficult times,” one contractor wrote in March, asking for “updates about the process … even if it’s bad news.”
“My housing situation makes this payment critical,” another contractor wrote in April.
The cases are part of the continuing fallout from the dismantling of the foreign aid programs, or as then-presidential advisor Elon Musk characterized it on his X social media platform, “feeding USAID into the wood chipper.” The USAID cuts were felt deeply in Baltimore, home to several humanitarian groups, such as Catholic Relief Services, and global health programs at Johns Hopkins and its affiliates that had received funding from the agency.
The bribery scheme that Vistant was named in was uncovered by USAID’s Office of the Inspector General in 2023 during the Biden administration and had been going on for about 10 years, according to the Justice Department.
The DOJ said that a USAID contracting officer, Roderick Watson, of Woodstock, agreed to receive bribes in exchange for using his influence to award contracts to a Florida man, Darryl Britt, who owned a company called Apprio. Vistant was a subcontractor to Apprio on one of the contracts received via Watson’s influence, the DOJ said, and eventually became a prime contractor.
Britt and Vistant’s Barnes paid bribes to Watson, often concealing them by passing them through Paul Young, of Columbia, another subcontractor, the DOJ said. The bribes also came in the form of laptops and cellphones, suite tickets to an NBA game, a country club wedding, down payments on houses and jobs for relatives, according to the DOJ.
The Justice Department said that while Vistant’s cooperation with the federal investigation was “initially delayed and limited,” it eventually began fully cooperating. The department decided that because the company accepted responsibility for its criminal conduct, and that paying a bigger penalty would threaten its continued viability, it would resolve the case with a deferred prosecution agreement and a civil settlement of $100,000.
In 2022, Vistant, then known as PM Consulting Group, was named the second fastest-growing private company by the Baltimore Business Journal, having tripled its annual revenue since 2019. It had 160 employees and made about $34.19 million in 2021, the Journal reported.
Have a news tip? Contact Jean Marbella at jmarbella@baltsun.com, 410-332-6060 or @jeanmarbella.bsky.social.