Investigators: US wildlife official broke law with grants

A senior official at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service broke the law with his involvement in awarding $324,000 in conservation grants to a nonprofit where his wife worked as a contractor, according to federal investigators. As chief of the agency's international conservation division, Richard Ruggiero made a series of grant awards and extensions to the International Fund for Animal Welfare beginning in 2014, according to a report from the Interior Department's Office of Inspector General. The awards improperly benefited Ruggiero's wife, Heather Eves, a wildlife biologist who was paid $5,600 by the nonprofit for training she conducted as part of the grants. A second group paid more than $14,000 to Eves for training under the program, investigators concluded. Ruggiero's involvement in the grant violated a federal law that prohibits government employees from participating in an official capacity in matters that could financially benefit them or their direct family, the report said. He's been placed on administrative leave pending disciplinary action, Interior Department spokeswoman Heather Swift said Wednesday...more