Firms

Real jobs, real pay, real chances for advancement: sound good? That's what Thursday's 12th annual Great Valley Job Fair will be about, according to Cherie Wright, spokeswoman for the Business Development and Training Center at Great Valley. A record 90 area companies will send representatives to talk to the 2,000-plus candidates expected, said Wright. Based on past years, she estimated, 200 to 300 people are likely to find employment through the event. "It really is all career fields," she added.

Michael DiBernardo once looked at cheeseballs as a way to a new life, but now they merely symbolize his fast track to financial disaster. But DiBernardo, of Mantua, N.J., doesn't blame cheeseballs for his plunge into bankruptcy. He blames himself for having too much faith in a self-styled group of entrepreneurs that included Robert Rego, who later became the influential aide to City Councilman Leland Beloff. How the companies, Rabbitt Inc. and Abstraw Inc., got behind the financial eight ball with cheese hors d'oeuvres is a footnote in the story of the short- lived group of 10 companies in which Rego was a partner with a convicted counterfeiter and two men later convicted as major drug dealers.

Federal authorities are seeking to determine whether a scrap-metal company paid a $5,873 credit-card bill for City Councilman Rick Mariano in the spring of 2002, shortly before the councilman flew to Las Vegas to get married. The questions concerning Erie Steel Ltd., a campaign supporter of Mariano's that is in his North Philadelphia district, are part of a larger inquiry that includes the councilman's dealings with several companies in the city, according to three City Hall sources familiar with subpoenas served on Mariano last week.

In 1980, the corporate officers at Technitrol Inc. had to make a decision - with a capital "D. " They had to decide whether to move their plant at 1952 E. Allegheny Ave. in Kensington - then a dying, dirty inner-city neighborhood - to a new facility in some bucolic suburb. In the end, for a variety of reasons, they renovated the Allegheny building and stayed put. And now Technitrol officials have joined forces with Kensington Action Now, a community group that has at times taken an anti- business stance.

Congress is digging into one factor in the stock-market fever that finally broke last year: Wall Street firms behaving like side-show barkers. "How come no major securities house predicted you might lose half your dough on the Nasdaq in less than a year?" Wall Street critic Benjamin Mark Cole asked before a House panel last week. "Or almost all your money on an eToys, Priceline or iVillage?" One study found that from late 1999 to late 2000, less than 1 percent of all analysts' recommendations were to sell particular stocks.

Amid a light snow, representatives of nine firms interested in managing the Paxon Hollow Country Club spent about five hours Saturday touring the golf course owned by Marple Township. The township in December invited private firms to propose new ways to manage the club and upgrade its facilities. Officials hoped to encourage creativity and flexibility in the proposals, according to L. Stephen Sudhop, township commissioner. "(The representatives) wanted to know why we weren't telling them what to do. . . . We said we are trying to tap into their expertise, and apply it to Paxon Hollow.

Let's see now - 30 percent of nearly $1 billion is more than $300 million. While the legal fee is unlikely to be quite that high, the payment from the largest anti-trust settlement is quite a healthy bonus for the small Philadelphia law firm of Fine, Kaplan & Black. The firm, co-lead counsel in a suit against brokerage firms for price-fixing on the Nasdaq Stock Market, squeezed a $910 million award out of 31 brokerages Wednesday. Add that to an earlier settlement of $98.9 million with six other firms, and you have a grand total of $1.01 billion.

The state Department of Transportation has temporarily suspended nine road- construction firms from bidding on projects for improperly giving a total of $31,000 in cash and gifts to PennDOT employees over a 10-year period. The suspended firms include Thomas M. Durkin & Sons Inc. and James D. Morrissey Inc., both major contractors located in Philadelphia, as well as companies headquartered in Glenside, Exton, Conshohocken and Atglen. State Inspector General Peter J. Smith recommended the action, after his office gathered evidence in a nearly yearlong inquiry that has also prompted the firing of two employees and the suspension of two others.

Two Bucks County engineering firms have settled charges of violating the state election code by agreeing to a one-year probation and donating $500 each to a charity, state authorities said yesterday. The two firms, both recipients of no-bid contracts in Bucks County, were charged in February by the state Attorney General's Office with failing to report more than $1,000 in contributions to Bucks County political parties in 1991. State law requires businesses that receive no-bid contracts from governments to report political contributions of more than $1,000.

Four businesses have been removed from a program that sets aside contracts for women and minorities after investigators determined that they were owned by neither women nor minority members, the program operators said yesterday. Five other firms are under investigation by the staff of the Minority Business Enterprise Council (MBEC), a city agency, for allegedly using blacks and women as fronts to win city contracts, MBEC officials said. The 1983 ordinance that the companies are accused of circumventing requires that 25 percent of city contract funds go to firms owned by minorities or women.