Breaking: a year long investigation has now revealed that Google purchased millions of gallons of jet fuel at sub-market prices from NASA and the Department of Defense!
NBC Bay Area’s Stephen Stock, Kevin Nious and Jeremy Carroll write:
Local officials in Santa Clara County confirm that the company owned by the Google founders, H211, pays no property taxes on the airplanes that are housed at Moffett—a potential loss to local tax rolls of up to $500,000 per airplane per year.
Nearly $8 million worth of jet fuel that sold for as little as $1.68 a gallon was put into a fleet of seven different airplanes and two helicopters that are kept on taxpayer-owned land at NASA’s Ames Research Center at Moffett Field. The same jet fuel sells for two to four-and-a-half times that amount, up to $8.05 a gallon, at fixed-base operators at nearby airports in the Bay Area.
This was made possible under a NASA Space Agreement which has allowed these planes to be housed at Moffett Field since 2007. In exchange, H211 agreed to pay NASA first $113,365.74 a month in rent. That figure later dropped to $108,938.62 a month in rent and NASA was allowed to use the planes for science.
According to federal records obtained by NBC Bay Area, there were 1,234 different fuelings using Department of Defense fuel alone, totaling 2,237,293 gallons at a cost of $6,716,513.05 dating back to April 7, 2009.
Those same records show H211 purchased fuel 106 times from NASA from 2007 until April, 2007, paying a total of $1,174,662.35.
An analysis of those records by NBC Bay Area also shows H211 paid anywhere from $1.68 a gallon to $3.79 a gallon from April, 2009, through April, 2013. That’s two to four and a half times cheaper than the same jet fuel would have cost at local fixed base operators at area airports.
In all, between the two federal agencies, the records show H211 purchased $7,891,175.35 in jet fuel at below-market rates.
Must be nice to have a virtual monopoly on search engines and unlimited, cheap fuel for jet engines.
Google’s jet fuel goes on the taxpayers’ bill, and in turn they harvest all of our personal cyber records. Gee. Sounds fair.
