Special Report on Greg Aziz

The rumors are true: Greg Aziz Indicted

Previously from our site: Off Shore Bank Accounts

And it's only taken three years...


The Staff at Shoalanda Speaks

AIDT Leaves Shoals/Your Deputies at Work

Alabama Industrial Training Development, or AIDT, was established over 40 years ago as part of the network of community colleges. Aside from four regional centers, the AIDT has offices on all community college campuses. The office at NWSCC in Muscle Shoals remains open and should serve the Shoals as long as the community college system remains funded by the state. Just what is the mission of the AIDT? In their own words:

AIDT, an institution of the Alabama Community College System, encourages economic development through job-specific training. Training services are offered in many areas, at no cost, to new and expanding businesses throughout the State.

Certainly this is a worthwhile endeavor; however, many of us had never heard of this program until the advent of the National Alabama rail car plant in Barton. Apparently it's not unusual for the AIDT to open satellite offices in areas where large new industrial development is taking place.

That is exactly what AIDT did upon the announcement that the long awaited rail car plant was actually locating in Colbert County. The AIDT opened a centrally located office at 737 East Avalon Avenue in Muscle Shoals in order to evaluate and recruit prospective workers, specifically welders, for National Alabama.

Now the office is closed. Signs indicate the unit is for rent. Apparently there is no longer a need for recruiting and training those 1800 employees for National Alabama. Those 70 rail cars a day that were to have been produced since January 2009? Are these even still spoken of, or did everything disappear with Alabama's answer to the Wizard of Oz Greg Aziz?

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Yesterday we mentioned the dearth of police officers in Cherokee forcing the citizenry to rely on Colbert County deputies. A reader wrote of her experience during a possible break-in:

Forget about the deputies showing up. A friend called 911 as her ex was threatening her and trying to break in her house. They told her it would be a couple of hours before they could come.

One day my alarm company called me at (work) and said they had called the Sheriff’s department about a possible break in. I finished what I was doing and drove the 30 min drive to south of Tuscumbia.

When I got home no one was there. I waited about 15 more minutes and walked around the house checking all the windows and doors. Everything seemed ok. I opened the door and grabbed a butcher knife in the kitchen and walked through the house, everything ok, so I called them and said that my alarm company had called them and I was at home and everything was ok. They said thank you. I could have been the burglar calling them.


Some recently read food for thought (tongue in cheek style): There's no longer any such thing as sin, just mistakes, and we are not responsible even for them.

Shoalanda

The Truth About National Steel Car Ltd.

National Steel Car Ltd. was to be the savior of the economy in Northwest Alabama. The Hamilton, Ontario, company promised a minimum of 1,500 jobs paying at least $16.00 an hour. Interestingly, the unionized Hamilton plant pays its workers the US equivalent of $26.00 an hour. Now the new plant, dubbed National Alabama, has seemingly returned to the genie's bottle from which it sprang--the same one holding the convoluted financial machinations of NSC's Greg Aziz.

According to Canadian sources, Aziz is not only president and chief executive officer of NSC, he owns 100% of the rail car manufacturing facility. Aziz is said to own only 10% of its Alabama counterpart. In 2007, Aziz announced the Hamilton plant was landlocked, a statement many in the Ontario manufacturing hub questioned. Aziz further declared that by 2012, the 100th anniversary of the manufacturing concern, the Hamilton plant would no longer be able to keep up with orders for new rail cars and hoppers.

Greg Aziz was looking for land at a cheap price and his quest soon brought him to the Shoals; obviously we were only too glad to be the recipient of his attentions. Just how closely did the powers that be look at Aziz's National Steel Car Ltd.? Seemingly most local and state industrial recruiters were viewing Aziz and his grandiose plans through a gauze covered lens.

As early as 2006, the Hamilton plant had begun laying off workers due to a slow down in orders. By 2009, NSC had sent 1,700 workers packing, leaving only 660 fully employed. NSC soon asked that those remaining take a 25% pay cut, and a strike ensued. Hamilton workers are members of the Teamsters Rail Union, while the prospective workers at Barton are not unionized--a fact that was not lost on Aziz.

While Greg Aziz told Shoals industrial leaders that the Barton plant would begin full operations as soon as the economy rallied, he failed to mention that at least one of NSC's chief competitors had already relocated to Mexico, siphoning away many of NSC's customers with a lower bottom line.

On July 19th, the TimesDaily reported that National Alabama had a total work force of 120 and had not yet received its first order for rail cars. On August 15th, the same newspaper offhandedly threw out the line:

When asked about the future of the railcar facility, Wright would only comment, “We're talking with companies that could operate in that facility.”

It may sound trite, but we have to ask: Just what do Forrest Wright and SEDA know and how long have they known it?

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Shoalanda



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