By The Fairewinds Crew
According to the FBI’s criminal investigation, First Energy (aka Energy Harbor since it came out of bankruptcy) is a regulated public utility that illegally used $61 Million in corporate funds to bribe energy regulators and state legislators in Ohio.
“Ohio House Speaker Larry Householder’s political operation accepted more than $60 million in bribe money from FirstEnergy Corp. to secure the company a $1.3 billion public bailout,” [according to the July 2020 federal complaint].
“Householder, chief political aide Jeff Longstreth, and lobbyists Matt Borges, Neil Clark, and Juan Cespedes used the bribe money to expand the speaker’s political power and enrich themselves by millions of dollars through a “web” of dark-money groups and bank accounts, including the 501(c)(4) Generation Now, according to the complaint.
Householder and the four others were charged with conspiracy to commit racketeering. Each could face up to 20 years in prison and a maximum $250,000 fine, court officials said Tuesday.”
Why? First Energy bribed the legislators and energy regulators to help fund Davis-Besse and Perry atomic power reactors near Lake Erie in northern Ohio. First Energy hoped to change its two money losing nukes into moneymakers by pushing the Ohio State Legislature to add a yearly “tax increase” for electricity totaling one billion dollars per year!
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If those nukes had closed instead of receiving that Billion Dollar subsidy, what exactly would that $61 million have bought?
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