Tag Archives: Costa Bajjali

local news

This guy is a 'business mentor'?

You’ve heard of the Peter Principle, yes? It’s the notion that people can be elevated to their “highest level of incompetence.”

Here, then, is a startling example of that principle at work.

David Wallace, the one-time co-owner of a master development firm that galloped into Amarillo making huge promises to re-create the city’s moribund downtown district, has been hired as a “business mentor” for a firm that teaches foreign entrepreneurs how to succeed in business.

Why is this so weird? Wallace’s company — Wallace Bajjali Development Partners — vaporized into thin air earlier this year in a dispute with co-owner Costa Bajjali. He left Amarillo — and Joplin, Mo. — high and dry. Joplin had hired Wallace Bajjali to help the city recover from the destruction caused by a tornado that tore through the city.

I don’t know whether to laugh or scream.

http://www.joplinglobe.com/news/local_news/david-wallace-finds-employment-as-business-mentor/article_5327216f-8a0a-56d2-a9f0-f1a0c7ee6bb4.html

Amarillo is proceeding with its downtown development efforts without David Wallace, the former Sugar Land mayor and self-proclaimed urban development hotshot.

His new employer is International Accelerator of Austin. Its website, according to the Joplin Globe newspaper, touts Wallace as a “key” player in the firm’s organizational chart.

As the Globe notes in its story on Wallace’s hiring, International Accelerator’s website doesn’t mention a key part of Wallace’s recent history.

You see, after he and Bajjali parted company, Wallace filed personal bankruptcy, claiming debts totaling in the millions of dollars and leaving him, according to the Globe, “in financial shambles.”

The Globe reports: “Wallace’s biography listed on the website touts his three-term history as mayor of Sugar Land, Texas, his work with the son of the late British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, and his experience in public-private partnerships.”

It makes me wonder if his new employers know the rest of the story.

business news, local news

David Wallace: All hat and no cattle?

David Wallace talked a good game when he came to visit us at the newspaper.

I think it was around 2011. He was a partner in this high-dollar development company. He brought his game to Amarillo and pitched it to local civic, government and business leaders. He and his partner, Costa Bajjali, would be the “lead developers” in the city’s effort to rebuild, revive, renovate and resuscitate downtown Amarillo.

He persuaded many of us that he had the goods. He could make it happen. I recall quite vividly the crux of his statement — which I cannot quote verbatim today — that Wallace Bajjali was not in the business of failure. He didn’t make all that money, Wallace implied, by putting the screws to communities that hired him and his company.

Well, guess what? Wallace Bajjali is now history. The firm’s relationship with the city has gone kaput. The Local Government Corporation has declared the firm to be in default. Wallace and Bajjali have had a serious falling out. Wallace has disappeared. So has Bajjali. The city is left holding the bag, so to speak, on a parking garage it still intends to build — despite the absence of Wallace Bajjali as the can’t-miss master developer.

I read in the paper today that Richard Brown, the current president of the LGC, said everyone — including the media should have done a better job of vetting Wallace Bajjali. I guess Brown is trying to shed some of the responsibility for this mess-up by suggesting the media deserve some of the blame for getting entangled with this company.

But the city did lay out some dough. I understand it totals about $1 million. For that kind of money, I think the public deserves an explanation on what in the world happened to this one-time supposedly fail-safe partnership.

I know we can’t force Wallace or Bajjali to spill the beans on each other. But as a taxpayer and as a one-time member of the media who was sold a bogus bill of goods, I’d like some answers to what went so terribly wrong.