CHARLOTTE, N.C. — MetLife won't say how many people it's transferring to Charlotte and how many it will hire locally.
When it moves to Ballantyne, the company plans to add 1,386 jobs to Charlotte’s economy.
But, Eyewitness News found, when it applied for city and county incentives, it wouldn’t say how many of the jobs would be "hired locally" and how many would be "relocated" from other MetLife offices. It typed “trade secret” in those boxes.
Eyewitness News requested emails and other paperwork leading up to the deal and noticed city and county staff exchanged emails in those final days, asking for those numbers.
One says "it would be useful to know" and "can [MetLife] provide us that information, even if only approximated?”
Ultimately, it looks like MetLife provided that information to the city, county and Chamber of Commerce in a March 4 PowerPoint presentation. But it still wants those numbers kept private. They were whited out before being passed along to Eyewitness News.
Tuesday, a spokesperson for MetLife told Eyewitness News, “We do not know how many of the more than 1,300 jobs will be transfers of existing employees and how many will be new hires.”
Eyewitness News also found out, from the incentives application, Charlotte beat out St. Louis for MetLife. St. Louis was also one of the finalists Charlotte beat out for the Democratic National Convention held last September.
WSOC
