Exclusive | Comptroller Brad Lander urged to reject new contract to run Downtown Heliport

The longtime operator of the Downtown Heliport is urging Comptroller Brad Lander to reject the city contract with its replacement — a foreign partnership selected by the Adams administration.Saker Aviation, which has run the city-run heliport for 18 years, is pushing back after the city Economic Development Corporation picked the Downtown Skyport LLC to run the city-owned heliport, which is used by President Trump’s Marine One and by US military and federal law enforcement officials.The replacement company is a partnership that includes Skyport Infrastructure — the UK-based Skyports firm and the operator of the London Heliport — and France’s Groupe ADP, which operates Paris’ three airports.William Wachtel, chairman of Saker, said in a Feb.6 letter to Lander that the replacement group should be disqualified because it appeared to have made “material misrepresentations” to the EDC that include allegedly concealing “felonious activity” by Groupe ADAP subsidiaries with projects in Croatia, Madagascar, Libya and the United Arab Emirates.Those resulted in “two deferred prosecution agreements with French financial prosecutors in 2023 and debarment by the World Bank Group in 2022,” Wachtel wrote in the letter, obtained by The Post.“We say ‘appears to’ because we find it difficult to imagine that EDC and the Mayor’s Office of Contract Services (“MOCS”) would knowingly make an award of this magnitude and importance to a serial felon,” Wachtel said. Wachtel said a second reason for disqualification is the joint venture’s claims that it “operated” Stewart International Airport, a Port Authority airport in the Hudson Valley. “This claim is utterly false,” Wachtel said.“In fact, Stewart Airport is operated by AvPORTS, a major US airport operator owned byGoldman Sachs and headquartered at Dulles International Airport in Virginia,” Wachtel said.“In 2019, a Group ADP subsidiary and an AvPORTS subsidiary formed a joint venture...