Earlier this week, we asked whether Scout Motors was about to receive more government benefits and how Richland County Council Vice Chair Derrek Pugh was tied in. Two days later, Pugh answered that question himself...by announcing that he has taken a job with Scout Motors while continuing to serve as a councilman.
Let's take a close look at Pugh and his record that, in retrospect, was setting himself up to take this position all along.
Scout Motors (subsidiary of Volkswagen) has been the most expensive and most secretive economic development deal in recent South Carolina history since it was rushed into law in 2023 in under a week. This corrupt deal that we have exposed since the very beginning has become the playbook for other huge "economic development" plans revolving around electric vehicles and solar projects across the state. Of course, Richland County officials have been in the middle of this Scout mess the entire time.
Pugh has served as the Richland County Councilman for District 2 for over five years and has served as the council's vice chair since 2024. Simultaneously, he has worked full time for more than four years as the South Carolina State Director for Abraxas Youth and Family Services and has taught at Allen University for the past five. Now add Scout Motors to the list.
According to Pugh's 2025 Statement of Economic Interest (SEI) Report, he also pulls a salary from United Cerebral Palsy of South Carolina. This is not included on his LinkedIn profile like the other jobs are.
The Abstention That Made Us Question
On July 14, Richland County Council voted 10-0 to send a letter of support to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, backing the City of Columbia's request for $11.4 million from the U.S. Economic Development Administration for the "Scout Water Storage Tank and Transmission Main Project." Pugh abstained from the vote, stating that his "parent company may receive benefits from the support letter."
What "parent company" is he referring to?
Whether he is referring to an actual parent company or just himself, we decided to check to see if he had any companies in SC that he has registered to himself...and we found several.
Derrek Pugh is the registered agent listed for three different nonprofits and one Limited Liability Company (LLC). Two of the nonprofit addresses trace back to random businesses in Orangeburg and one out of what appears to be his personal home. The LLC, named Hitchcock Group, LLC, was incorporated July 13, 2023, five months after the Scout Motors deal was passed by the legislature and signed by Governor McMaster.
The Hitchcock Group address links back to a rundown strip mall off Two Notch Road in Columbia and, from what we can tell, has no internet footprint. Another shell corporation? Hmm...
Pugh's Voting Record
Long before his recent abstention, Pugh was a reliable yes. By our count, he voted eight times in favor of Scout related deals, tax breaks, and road widenings across 2023 and 2024. On October 17, 2023, Pugh voted to acquire the Blythewood facility that Scout now uses to train its employees. That training center is roughly $25 million and was built with help from readySC, the Department of Commerce, Midlands Technical College, and Richland County.
We cannot resist to pose the question...Will Derrek Pugh end up training in the building the county bought with his yes vote?
What We Cannot See
Since 2024, Pugh has sat on the county's Economic Development Committee, which placed him inside the executive session updates on the Scout project after the deal was signed. Those meetings are conveniently not recorded and posted to YouTube the way regular council sessions are, so the public has no idea what is being discussed, even outside the executive sessions. It's not surprising however, when you remember that this project has always been run behind closed doors.
For example, The Nerve reported that over two months before the Scout deal became public (January 2023), Richland County entered into an non-disclosure agreement (NDA) with the South Carolina Department of Commerce in regards to Scout Motors which “broadly bound the county to nondisclosure on all matters related to the project." That NDA was in effect until the deal was passed and made public as of March 2023, completely blindsiding Blythewood residents and the taxpayers of South Carolina.
Did Derrek Pugh sign an NDA regarding Scout Motors early on? It's a question worth asking.
As a part of the Economic Development Committee, Pugh voted in favor of the Blythewood Road widening contract on September 17, 2024, which serves the main artery of the Scout plant. We do not have the minutes from the July 7, 2026 committee meeting where the EDA federal funding letter was voted on, but you can check out the agenda HERE.
The Small Business "Champion"
Here is the part that should bother anyone who has heard Pugh talk about small business. He has chaired the county's Office of Small Business ad hoc committee since 2023, and he likes to call small businesses "the backbone of our community."
As Tony Spain stated in a previous article this past February, “Scout Motors should take a loan, look for other investors or use cash reserves. Small businesses rarely, if ever, get this kind of treatment, they just help foot the bill along with taxpayers.”
It’s easier and safer for politicians to give out a large sum of cash to one big company that has a high chance of success so they can receive praise for “all the jobs they helped create” rather than hundreds of small business start-ups, half of which statistically will fail in their first five years.
In 2024, Pugh told the Free Times that smart growth meant attracting businesses that want "to establish a strong, long-term relationship with us, in order for our constituents to have opportunities to be employed." He called that "really, really key." He was right about the opportunity to be employed. It just turned out to be his...
Pugh Gives Government Money to His Wife's DEI Nonprofit
Teshieka Pugh, Derrek Pugh's wife, was diversity officer for Junior League of Columbia 2024-2025, a nonprofit for women's leadership. Richland County Council has given the Junior League three huge checks totaling $60,500 in just three years:
- February 2024: $20,000
- February 2025: $25,000
- February 2026: $15,500
In the Junior League's form 990 for 2024-2025, they do not include any mention of government money in their "government grants" section. Can the conflict of interest get any worse than this?
This isn't the first time we have caught Pugh giving hard-earned taxpayer dollars to his personal special interests. As previously reported, Pugh's own fraternity collected more than $10,000 in the county's FY 2023-2024 budget.
While we are at it, take a quick look at the video that Richland County produced in 2024 of Derrek Pugh discussing how excited he is for Scout Motors and how they have been "working together to make sure...that the community understands that we are not trying to kill the quality of life as we grow but at the same time making sure that we are being good stewards to our new neighbors at Scout Motors."
In the video Pugh praises Jeff Ruble, the Richland County Economic Development Director at the time, who we previously caught doxxing every Blythewood citizen who publicly shared concerns about the Scout deal. Richland County paid tens of thousands of dollars to have these citizens (and even a sitting legislator) stalked online and circulated the list around state government. Want to guess whose money they used to pay for it? It was our tax dollars...
It's not surprising that Pugh praises someone like Ruble, as Pugh (just last year) trespassed a concerned constituent of his who was educating the community on the $1.4 BILLION budget that Richland County Council was about to pass in June 2025. But we will have more on that later.
The Pattern That No One Can Refute
It's the merry-go-round that never stops turning off the same grift. Scout Motors arrived in South Carolina as a backroom deal and has stayed one. The legislature rammed through a $1.3 billion incentive package, including $400 million in cash, that most people (even certain legislators) had no idea even existed.
We have documented how the state reached into a COVID era contingency reserve fund, money set aside for virus-related economic hardship, to help pay for it, sidestepping the two-thirds vote and the fiscal impact statement the Constitution would otherwise require.
The Nerve exposed the secret meetings that preceded all of it, and the Governor's own chief of staff told the Commerce Secretary that residents who did not like it could take it up through elections. When residents did object, Richland County Economic Development circulated a letter naming them as vocal opponents. That is the machine Pugh has been operating inside, and the county has kept its own share of it in the dark.
The deal has only gotten worse. It is now more than $150 million over budget (that legislators are working to sneak in the state budget). Not a single vehicle has been built. Production has slipped to the end of 2027, and Scout took its headquarters and 1,200 white collar jobs to Charlotte after South Carolina had already opened its checkbook. Volkswagen, Scout's parent, reported more than $47 billion in cash on hand. The taxpayers of this state are carrying all the risk while their politicians reap all the benefits.
Derrek Pugh is just another confirmation of a pattern we have traced for more than three years. The same actors that brought Scout to Blythewood and ignored their citizens wishes (while actively lying to them about the benefits) kept voting to roll out the red carpet for a foreign corporation that is being completely subsidized by our state, Richland County, and the Town of Blythewood. Now, one of them is an official employee.
