Even if viewed in the world of loose-ruled, corporate deal-making, an aggressive business atmosphere which the state’s quasi public agencies were meant to emulate, the Connecticut Port Authority’s creation of what has become a $255 million project remaking New London’s State Pier has been especially sleazy.

It started, we now know, in part with an influence-peddling campaign by a marine consulting vendor, Seabury PFRA LLC, which just last month agreed to pay a $10,000 ethics fine for giving illegal gifts to two employees and a board member of the port authority.

It turns out that Seabury, the company which eventually landed a pivotal and very rich consulting deal for remaking the pier, already had an inside track to capture the port authority’s business.

Henry Juan, a Seabury managing director, sat on the port authority’s board of directors at the same time the company began courting the quasi public agency’s business.

Juan and his wife were evidently the hosts of an expensive supper, costing $522.18, at the Greenwich Country Club the night of Aug. 16, 2017, entertaining both the executive director of the port authority, Evan Matthews, Matthews’s wife, and Don Frost, another port authority board member.

You can imagine the toasts that night in the country club dining room, a jolly event that wouldn’t come publicly to light for five more years, part of the extensive gifting to port authority insiders included in last month’s ethics fines against Seabury.

The deal that might have been envisioned in toasts that night in Greenwich eventually put Seabury in charge of finding a new port operator for New London.

Under Seabury’s guidance, the politically-connected operator of the competing port in New Haven was chosen to run State Pier and became the state’s partner in a still-unfinished project marred by nightmarish cost overruns and a federal corruption investigation.

Seabury’s Henry Juan conveniently resigned from the port authority board just before his employer landed the quasi-public agency’s contract.

But surely everyone in the port authority and on the board must have recognized the sleaze factor in granting a rich contract to the employer of someone who had an inside track, a seat on the board until the last moment, and was busy wining and dining other insiders.

Indeed, the deal was so rotten just on the surface that it became part of a whistleblower complaint about all the corruption in the agency.

We also now know that, not only was the Seabury deal suspect because it went to an insider giving illegal gifts to decision makers, but it was possibly illegal because of a wildly-generous $500,000 “success” fee, paid on top of the routine consulting fees.

The Connecticut State Contracting Standards Board, after reviewing the controversial success fee, found it comparable to finders fees, which the legislature outlawed after another scandal.

The board has asked Attorney General William Tong to investigate whether the success fee paid to Seabury was illegal. Tong says his office is already investigating the whistleblower complaint about the Seabury contract.

Tong’s investigation, though, is getting pretty long in the tooth, and I would be very surprised if the loyal Democrat lets any findings from it rip any time before the fall election.

Gov. Lamont’s current scandal managers at the port authority would like you to believe that all the corruption happened years ago, and they’ve cleaned it all up.

But the public didn’t even learn until this month that an employee and board member getting illegal gifts from Seabury have remained in their roles at the agency all this time. The employee, never disciplined, has been put in charge of ethics compliance. Honest.

I made a request of the port authority July 18, under freedom of information laws, for copies of any subpoenas it has received from the attorney general in the Seabury probe, after his spokesperson disclosed the issuance of subpoenas.

Authority board Chairman David Kooris said last week the agency would comply “as CPA resources are available.” Executive Director Ulysses Hammond said in an email Monday that he would report back on the subpoenas by Friday.

Wouldn’t we all want to know what the attorney general might be asking about what may have been an illegal deal that went to an insider’s employer, a company that was illegally wining and dining agency management.

You would think that with state and federal investigators circling, the agency would want to quickly get out of cover-up mode.

This is the opinion of David Collins

d.collins@theday.com