Federal officials say top SCANA executives lied about a nuclear report.

For months, they tried to keep it secret and alter it.

The author of the report was Bechtel Corp., among the world’s largest construction and engineering firms.

Nuclear project partners SCANA and Santee Cooper paid Bechtel $1 million to study the project’s rising costs and long delays.

The Chronicle has revealed the billions of dollars in rising costs and long delays while SCANA executives lied to investors including their own employees about billions of dollars in federal tax credits.

The credits were to encourage utilities to build new nuclear reactors.

After the executives read the Bechtel’s report, they continued to tell investors that both reactors would be finished on time.

The Securities and Exchange Commission charges that Marsh and Byrne “knew the new nuclear units would not be completed in time to qualify” for credits.

The Bechtel findings were finally released after Gov. Henry McMaster forced Santee Cooper to give it up.

The auditors found construction, engineering, procurement and oversight problems long before the project was abandoned.

The SEC charges:

• SCANA “went to great lengths” to hide Bechtel’s findings from the public, regulators and investors.

• Marsh tried to delay Bechtel’s final report, and when it was finished he told Bechtel to send it to SCANA’s attorney.

The attorney told Bechtel to scrub key portions of the audit, including sections that questioned whether SCANA would finish the project in time to qualify for federal tax credits.

• SCANA stripped the report of findings that the company failed in its oversight over primary contractor Westinghouse Electric.

• SCANA executives, in a 2016 call with Westinghouse, learned their contractor wouldn’t speed up its work enough to meet the deadline for tax credits.

In his notes, Marsh wrote:“Schedules unrealistic.”

The filing charges:

• The defendants claimed the project was on track even though they knew it was far behind schedule.

This could make it unlikely to qualify for the tax credits.

• A SCANA executive said officers “flew around the country showing the same...construction pictures from different angles and played our fiddles” as the project went “up in flames.”

• False statements and omissions let SCANA boost its stock price, sell more than $1 billion in bonds, and obtain PSC approval to raise rates 9 times.

“When making statements to the public, executives cannot provide false information or half-truths,” said Richard Best, SEC Atlanta Regional Office director.

The SEC charged that:

• SCANA, SCE&G, Marsh and Byrne violated-fraud provisions of securities law.

• Marsh, SCANA and SCE&G and Marsh made reporting violations.

The complaint seeks a permanent injunction, return of allegedly ill-gotten gains with pre-judgment interest, and financial penalties fom all defendants and an officer and director bar against Marsh and Byrne.