Mark 1 Restoration Company and its owner, Mark Snedden, have agreed to a $7,257,232.12 resolution of civil claims arising from kickbacks the company paid to an Amtrak employee to win favorable changes to a contract renovating the façade of Philadelphia's 30th Street Station, the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania and the Amtrak Office of Inspector General announced on July 17, 2026. The civil settlement closes a matter that already sent four Mark 1 executives to federal prison and drew a Federal Railroad Administration suspension barring the company and the men from federally funded work.

Background

Amtrak awarded Mark 1 a $58,473,000 contract in December 2015 to serve as prime contractor on the façade repair and restoration project at 30th Street Station in Philadelphia. Federal funding supplied roughly 90 percent of the money. An Amtrak project manager oversaw the work on the government side, controlling the flow of change orders and contract modifications and holding access to internal project information.

According to the government, that oversight role became the product Mark 1 bought. Mark 1 executives, with the knowledge and agreement of the owner, gave the Amtrak employee gifts and other things of value totaling approximately $323,686. The list, as recited by prosecutors, runs well beyond sports tickets and steak dinners: paid vacations, jewelry, cash, dinners, entertainment, transportation, a dog, and training for that dog.

What the company got back was leverage over the paperwork that governs project cost. The Amtrak OIG, whose investigation drove the case, states that the former project manager approved more than $52 million in additional change orders and contract modifications and supplied internal project information to the contractor. Some of those modifications falsely inflated the true cost of the work, and Amtrak was overbilled by approximately $2 million.

The ratio is the part contracting officers should sit with. Roughly $324,000 in gifts moved a change-order pipeline worth more than $52 million — value steered through a single compromised approver at more than 160 times the cost of compromising him.

Key Details

The civil resolution has two components. Mark 1 and Snedden will pay $2,400,000 in cash and release Amtrak from any claim to $4,857,232.12 in additional funds Amtrak retained or did not pay out after learning of the kickback scheme — together, $7,257,232.12. The structure matters: roughly two-thirds of the recovery is money Amtrak already held and simply stopped paying once the conduct surfaced. Withholding, in this case, did more work than litigation.

The criminal side resolved first. Four Mark 1 executives were prosecuted and sentenced in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. Snedden, the president and owner, was sentenced on October 1, 2025, to 90 months in prison and a $250,000 fine. Donald Seefeldt, senior executive vice president, got 57 months and a $50,000 fine on June 3, 2025. Lee Maniatis, the chief operating officer, got 18 months on October 24, 2025. Khaled Dallo, a vice president, got two months and a $20,000 fine on November 21, 2025, for conspiracy to commit federal program bribery. All four were also ordered to pay more than $2 million in joint restitution. Sentences reaching from the owner through the COO and out to a fourth executive signal that prosecutors charged the kickback program as company practice, not the work of a rogue estimator.

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The suspension is the consequence with the longest tail. The Federal Railroad Administration suspended the four men and Mark 1 from participating in all federally funded procurement and non-procurement activities — a scope that shuts off federally funded transit and rail projects flowing through state and local recipients, not just contracts signed directly with a federal agency.

Three agencies ran the investigation: Amtrak OIG, the FBI and the U.S. Department of Transportation OIG. Assistant U.S. Attorneys Peter Carr and Landon Y. Jones handled the civil matter, with assistance from litigative consultant Denis Cooke.

James Harper, Special Agent in Charge of Amtrak OIG's Eastern Field Office, framed the outcome around who absorbs the cost. “When contractors and insiders manipulate the procurement process through bribes and overbilling, taxpayers ultimately pay the price,” he said.

What It Means for Contractors

The mechanism here is change orders, and that is the uncomfortable part. Change orders are ordinary. Every restoration contract of any size generates them, and the government leans on the project manager closest to the work to judge whether a modification is justified and priced correctly. That reliance is the control. When a single approver is bought, often nothing else stands between the contractor and $52 million in modifications.

Firms doing infrastructure restoration work should check whether change-order approval on their projects concentrates in one government contact with no independent cost review. That is not a gap a contractor can close from its own side of the table, but it shows where scrutiny will land. Expect agencies to add second-level review and modification-pattern analysis on façade, envelope and heritage restoration work, where scope genuinely does change once crews open a wall and pricing is hard to benchmark.

The itemized gift list shows how granular prosecutors get when reconstructing hospitality. A dog and its training became part of a federal charging narrative. Companies that let business development spend on government personnel run through expense reports, with no gift policy tied to specific dollar thresholds and recipients, are assembling the government's exhibit list for it.

The suspension deserves separate planning attention. Mark 1's monetary exposure runs roughly $7.26 million plus restitution and fines — survivable for many mid-sized firms. Exclusion from all federally funded procurement and non-procurement activity is not. Suspension and debarment authority sits with the agency, moves faster than litigation, and does not wait for a civil judgment. For a contractor whose backlog is federally funded, that is the sanction that ends the business, and it follows individual executives to their next employer.

Note where the money came from. Amtrak withheld nearly $4.9 million once it learned of the scheme, and that withholding survived into the settlement. Retainage and withheld payments are the government's fastest leverage in a fraud matter, and contractors under investigation should assume unpaid amounts are effectively frozen long before any resolution is negotiated.

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