After honing skills abroad, Matt Meyer seeks statewide audience in governor's race

This story was produced by Spotlight Delaware as part of a partnership with Delaware Online/The News Journal. For more about Spotlight Delaware, visit www.spotlightdelaware.org .

Over the past eight years, New Castle County Executive Matt Meyer has built his political cachet at the local level, most recently directing hundreds of millions of federal COVID relief dollars to projects across northern Delaware, including to the conversion of a hotel into the state’s flagship homeless shelter.

He built up his prominence in northern Delaware after a previous career outside of politics, which included doing deals for businesses in Iraq, Kenya, and New York.

Now, Meyer is seeking to become Delaware’s next governor, and to do that he’ll use his campaign’s substantial war chest to broaden his appeal to a statewide electorate.

But he’ll have to overcome recent setbacks in New Castle County government, and he’ll need to convince Democratic Party members – who have already begun to fall into the establishment and progressive camps of his two opponents – that his way is the one to follow.

One competitor, Lt. Gov. Bethany Hall-Long, has been endorsed by a slew of top establishment Democratic Party officials, including Gov. John Carney and Speaker of the House Valerie Longhurst.

Meanwhile, Collin O’Mara, president of the National Wildlife Federation, snagged the endorsement of the Working Families Party, an upstart progressive group that has dramatically grown its influence in recent years within Delaware and nationally.

Earlier this year, Meyer’s sole endorsement from a Delaware elected official or political group has come from Rep. Nnamdi Chukwuocha, a Democrat from Wilmington.

When asked about it, a spokesman for Meyer’s candidacy pointed to what he said were more than 4,300 contributions that people from across Delaware have made to the campaign.

The spokesman, Nick Merlino, called those contributions “endorsements from voters.”

Meyer struck a similar tone in an interview with Spotlight Delaware earlier this year, during which he called his campaign “people-powered.”

That list of endorsements has since expanded to include the American-Ethiopian Public Affairs Committee, former state chairman of the state Democratic Party Erik Raser-Schramm, and the Delaware Democratic Party Pride Caucus, according to Meyer's campaign.

Merlino also noted that Meyer has raised far more money for his campaign than his opponents in the race for governor.

At the end of 2023, his campaign held $1.7 million. The amount was a product largely of contributions that flowed in during the previous three years – including $672,000 that the campaign raised in 2023.

Still, a substantial portion totaling $580,000 came from loans that Meyer personally made to his campaign.

Meyer touts a good government message, and says his accomplishments at the county include the creation of the Hope Center homeless shelter, publishing the county’s “checkbook” online, and funding a computer coding program run by a company, called Code Differently.

But Meyer – a political novice when he took the helm of the county eight years ago – also faces vulnerabilities. And, while he encountered obstacles during his first six years in office, his political setbacks have appeared to grow over the past year.

Last year, his administration proposed rezoning 87 properties across northern Delaware, in what officials said was a necessary step to align those parcels with the county’s updated comprehensive plan.

In response, many hundreds of largely suburban residents packed into government offices and local fire halls to denounce and protest the proposal . Many pointed their ire at a handful of the rezonings that would make way for a mega warehouse near Middletown, a multi-story office building in Alapocas, and hydrogen fuel facilities between Delaware City and New Castle.

More recently, Meyer’s signature accomplishment in government has become a potential vulnerability. Last month, the county ousted the company contracted to operate the Hope Center, just after an audit showed it failed to properly report all money flowing into the facility.

HOPE CENTER MANAGEMENT: Did the Delaware Center for Homeless Veterans misuse pandemic money meant for center?

The decision came several months after the Hope Center’s second largest contractor left the facility, following allegations it had fraudulently diverted more than $300,000 away from its intended uses of paying for meals and services.

Meyer and his administration have said little about either of the recent controversies.

Instead, his campaign sticks to its message that he has a “successful track record of tackling housing insecurity, fighting climate change, protecting public health, improving public safety, promoting diversity & inclusion, and creating better futures for kids.”

His campaign also frequently points to Meyer’s work experience before he became a politician, noting that he had been a “middle school math teacher and a small business owner.”

While it is an accurate statement about his career, a Spotlight Delaware analysis reveals that there is more to his story. And, that nuance indicates how he has built enough wealth to loan his campaign hundreds of thousands of dollars.

E-Commerce in Africa

Since 2013, Meyer has owned and overseen an e-commerce business that allows people in East Africa to buy goods from American online retailers.

The name of the company, Vitumob , is derived from the slang used on the streets of Nairobi, he said.

It means “a lot of stuff,” he said. Meyer’s career can be described in a similar manner, with positions in finance, government, international development and education.

But perhaps most curious of all is his entrepreneurship in East Africa.

In the immediate years after Meyer founded Vitumob, the company operated as a website with a browser extension software that piggybacked onto American e-commerce sites, allowing shoppers to choose items from those companies, then make the purchase with Vitumob.

Today, the company simply asks its customers to place Vitumob’s warehouse addresses as the destination for their orders.

The customer orders are then sent to those warehouses in the United Kingdom or in Delaware – taking advantage of the state’s lack of sales tax – where Meyer’s company forwards them to Kenya.

“You can now shop directly from Amazon, pay using MPesa or PayPal and have it delivered to you in Nairobi, Kenya,” Vitumob states on its company Twitter page.

Meyer’s campaign said Vitumob does not have any agreement or contracts with Amazon or any other American retailers.

In the United States, the company operates under the name Wise Men Shipping LLC.

“Customers use Wise Men Shipping to deliver goods legally and efficiently from the United States to East Africa. Any relationship with any retailer is between the customer and the retailer (who the retailer instructs to deliver to Wise Men Shipping),” Meyer’s campaign said in an email.

A review of comments on social media about Vitumob shows a range of rants and raves that is typical of such an operation.

One commenter on Twitter said, “In my former job almost everyone was shopping on Amazon thanks to VituMob,” while another said that a competing company “delivered faster.”

Asked in the interview last month how much he earns as owner of Vitumob, Meyer demurred, saying the primary purpose of the business is to “help people on the other side of the tracks.”

When pressed, he said Vitumob’s profits are typically in the “five-figure range … and every now and then, it’s a little more than that.” Meyer said he reinvests most of those profits back into the company, rather than taking them out as cash.

“I’ve never made a million dollars a year, I’ve never made a half a million dollars a year,” he said.

Meyer also said his company employs two workers in Delaware.

In early April, one of the two was packing a variety of home products into large rectangular boxes at the warehouse in Northeast Wilmington. He then loaded them onto a U-Haul truck bound for JFK International Airport.

Early years in Kenya

Meyer first traveled to Kenya for a college study abroad program in the early 1990s.

Meyer chose the East African country because he was “one of these kids that always wanted to go to Africa,” he said during a lecture he gave a decade ago to college students.

After college, Meyer returned to Kenya and by the late 1990s he began to form his first African startup – a footwear company called Ecosandals Inc.

In a blog post from 20 years ago, Meyer described how the business, which made sandals from recycled rubber, changed his view about capitalism.

He said that such recycling efforts – which can be seen as signs of virtue in the United States – were important ways that people in impoverished areas of Kenya made money.

By 2012, Delaware Sen. Chris Coons toured Meyer’s operations in Kenya and, while there, promoted a U.S. law designed to help remove certain export costs for sub-Saharan African companies, such as Ecosandals.

In his interview earlier this year, Meyer said Ecosandals is no longer operational.

An oil deal in Iraq

Beyond startups, Meyer also worked for several years in the early 2000s as a corporate attorney and business consultant, helping to iron out multibillion-dollar deals for massive companies, such as GE and the Blackstone Group, according to an archived version of his attorney profile page.

It was that work that led him to a job with the U.S. Department of State as an economic adviser in war-torn Iraq. His experience there was featured in a 2011 article in the news magazine of Brown University – Meyer’s alma mater.

The story described how Meyer’s college roommate had recruited him to the diplomatic post during the height of the Great Recession, in part because of this experience “hammering out investment deals on Wall Street.”

At that point, Meyer’s career had included stops at the private equity firm, Aquiline Capital Partners, and with the internationally prominent corporate law firm Simpson Thacher and Bartlett.

In the article, Meyer described the work in Iraq as “a new challenge to use the talents I learned on Wall Street to serve my country.”

A military handbook from 2010 described the economic reconstruction that Meyer engaged in as done by teams of civilians and soldiers who “gain access to local power centers” to determine the economic issues to address.

Among the deals he ultimately did in Iraq was to advise “a privately-held oil and gas services company” when it received an investment from the International Finance Corporation, according to the archived attorney webpage.

The privately-held oil company referenced in the profile appears to be HKN Energy, which was working on the expansion of an oil field in northern Iraq at the time.

2023 YEAR END REPORTS: Meyer leads among Democratic gubernatorial candidates, raising over $675K in donations

Asked if it was HKN Energy who he had advised then, Meyer said in a statement that “he met with many different businesses to assist in stabilizing Iraq. He does not recall meeting with HKN or advising them.”

Meyer left Iraq in 2011.

By 2013, he founded Vitumob and began working as a teacher at Prestige Academy Charter School in Wilmington.

In those same years, he also worked for yet another corporate law firm, Washington, D.C.-based Potomac Law Group.

Asked how he was able to split his time between Prestige Academy and Potomac, Meyer said he did the legal work “during vacation and on weekends when time permitted.”

By 2016, Meyer turned to politics, launching a run for New Castle County executive and lending his campaign $100,000 that year. After a long and vitriolic campaign, he defeated the longtime county executive Tom Gordon.

The victory was a clear message to Delaware’s establishment that Meyer would be a formidable candidate for office during the elections to come. It also was a victory that Meyer proudly cites in campaign literature today.

“When insiders said I had no shot against a 12-year incumbent I ran for New Castle County Executive anyway,” Meyer said in a campaign ad.

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This article originally appeared on Delaware News Journal: After honing skills abroad, Matt Meyer seeks statewide audience in governor's race