November 19, 2025
A federal judge signed off Tuesday on a $34 million legal settlement between former owners of stock in South Carolina’s now-defunct SCANA Corp. and the auditing firm tasked with monitoring the utility company’s books amid the V.C. Summer nuclear expansion.
The deal, which comes more than eight years after SCANA and state-owned utility company Santee Copper abandoned the project in rural Fairfield County, holds accounting giant Deloitte & Touche LLP responsible for its failure to alert shareholders to the fraud associated with the multibillion-dollar project’s failure.
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The total number of shareholders in line for a share of the funds is still unknown, according to Laura Posner, the court-appointed attorney from the firm Cohen Milstein who represented shareholders. She expects the number of beneficiaries to be largely the same in both cases.
Investors accused the accounting firm of shirking its duties as a gatekeeper and issuing misleading audit reports about the progress of the nuclear project, which never came to fruition.
By giving the company’s books a “clean” bill of health, Deloitte led investors to believe SCANA would complete the project in time to qualify for $1.4 billion in nuclear tax credits.
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Posner also pointed to a memo from a Deloitte employee, penned after a SCANA accountant had sounded the alarm on cost overruns and delays, saying Deloitte should have done more to investigate the whistleblower’s claims.
Had Deloitte alerted investors, they “would not have purchased their SCANA shares, and certainly not at the prices they paid,” according to a statement from Cohen Milstein.
Read Federal Judge Approves $34M Settlement Against Accounting Firm in Failed SC Nuclear Project.