Defense Contractor

Martin Marietta Corp., enjoying wider profit margins from the consolidation of several recent acquisitions, yesterday reported a 13.5 percent gain in earnings during the third quarter.The Bethesda-based company earned $149 million, or $1.39 a share, in the period ended Sept. 30, compared with earnings of $131 million, or $1.21 a share, a year ago. The gain came on revenues of $2.56 billion, just 3.9 percent more than the $2.47 billion a year earlier.Martin's profits exceeded analysts' consensus estimate of $1.28 share.

United Industrial Corp. has picked Richard E. Erkeneff, a senior executive of McDonnell Douglas Corp., to head its struggling AAI Corp. subsidiary in Cockeysville.Mr. Erkeneff succeeds Thomas V. Murphy, who resigned under fire as president and chief executive in April following a sharp drop in AAI's earnings. The falloff was caused partly by a $23 million corporate restructuring and the disappointing performance of a commercial flight simulation company AAI acquired two years ago to lessen its dependence on a declining Pentagon budget.

LOS ANGELES - Northrop Grumman Corp., the third-largest U.S. defense contractor, agreed yesterday to pay $111 million to settle claims that TRW Inc., acquired by Northrop in December, overcharged the federal government on some space projects. The agreement resolves lawsuits filed in 1994 and 1995 by a former employee claiming that TRW improperly billed the government for some costs. The settlement was factored into the TRW purchase and won't reduce Northrop's profit forecast for this year, Northrop said In settling TRW's case, Northrop didn't admit violating the False Claims Act, enacted during the Civil War to combat fraud by defense contractors.

We want your opinions ISSUE: Anne Arundel County Executive Janet S. Owens is pushing for a math and science magnet program for Meade High School, and she says a major county employer - defense contractor Northrop Grumman Corp. - is ready to become a partner in the effort. Local, state and military leaders have pursued a magnet program at Meade to bolster the school's academic reputation and attract thousands of defense workers, mostly from Northern Virginia, who are considering whether to relocate to Fort Meade amid base realignment.

KEYW Corp., a Hanover-based defense contractor that offers cybersecurity and counterterrorism solutions to government agencies, said Monday that it will sell 6.5 million shares of stock in a new public offering to raise money to pay down debt and complete a recently announced company acquisition. The publicly traded company said last week that it intended to acquire Poole & Associates Inc., of Annapolis Junction, for $126 million in cash and stock. The company last week also announced the acquisition of Sensage Inc., of Redwood City, Calif., for nearly $35 million in cash and stock.

WASHINGTON - Armed guards at a Lockheed Martin Corp. factory escorted a senior government fraud-hunter out the door Thursday after he and two colleagues accused the giant defense contractor of trying to bill the Pentagon for huge overcharges in the building of C-5 Galaxy and C-130 Hercules cargo airplanes, the government employee said yesterday. Ken Pedeleose, an industrial engineer and nine-year veteran with the federal Defense Contract Management Agency, had accused Lockheed Martin of billing the Air Force $714 for a rivet and $5,217 for a 1-inch-long bracket for the C-5. Each aircraft requires hundreds of the items.

Aberdeen Proving Ground has a lot more money to spend on contracts than it once did but not as much as in the very recent past. Such is the push-pull effect of new funding from the military's national base realignment and closure effort, coupled with tighter federal budgets and less wartime spending. The Army post in Harford County obligated $15.5 billion in the fiscal year that ended in September. That's up $12 billion from 2005, the year the BRAC changes were announced, but down nearly $2 billion from 2011.

Maryland legislative leaders gave their approval yesterday for the transfer of up to $2.5 million from one state fund to another so that the money can be used by Gov. William Donald Schaefer and economic development officials in their efforts to attract General Dynamics Corp.'s new corporate headquarters.In asking the General Assembly to transfer the monies from the Maryland Industrial Land Act to the state's so-called "Sunny Day Fund," J. Randall Evans, secretary of economic and employment development (DEED)

WASHINGTON -- The leader of a congressional effort to block a Clinton administration payment of $31 million in executive bonuses for Lockheed Martin Corp. has asked the Pentagon for key documents that would justify the windfall for the nation's largest defense contractor.Rep. Bernard Sanders, a Vermont independent, asked the Defense Department's inspector general to provide Congress with executive agreements between the company and the Pentagon that permit use of taxpayer money to help finance $92 million in payments the executives gave themselves for completing the merger of Lockheed Corp.

Northrop Grumman Corp. announced yesterday that first-quarter profit from its defense businesses was largely unchanged from last year, disappointing analysts who had expected gains - particularly from the company's Baltimore-area electronics division. Although the Los Angeles-based defense contractor reported a 34 percent drop in net income for the first three months of 2001, the decrease was attributed almost entirely to stock market losses suffered by the company's pension fund. Overall profit in the quarter, including pension income, was $103 million, or $1.42 per share, compared with $156 million, or $2.23 per share, reported for the first quarter of last year.