FirstEnergy's relentless push for secrecy in its bribery case continues. This time, transparency is in the hands of the PUCO -- whose former chairman allegedly took a $4.3 million bribe from the company.
AKRON, Ohio — The following article was originally published in the Ohio Capital Journal and published on News5Cleveland.com under a content-sharing agreement.The company’s request will soon be decided by the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio, whose former chairman Sam Randazzo allegedly accepted a $4.3 million bribe from the company for favorable regulatory treatment.
The company argued that release of the records would undermine a pause on the regulatory investigations made at the behest of federal prosecutors working on the criminal case; that the records aren’t the OCC’s to share; that they’re “commercially sensitive;” and that they violate FirstEnergy’s rights laid out in the protective order.
Alongside the Randazzo bribe, FirstEnergy said in a deferred prosecution agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice it paid a nonprofit secretly controlled by Householder $60 million through other nonprofits that aren’t required to disclose the source of their funding. Householder allegedly used the funds for personal and political gain, and to engineer the passage of House Bill 6 in 2019 — energy legislation worth an estimated $1.3 billion to the company.
In response to a similar records request from the Ohio Capital Journal and other media outlets, the OCC declined to provide all 39 records, stating it’s still assessing how to proceed given state records law and FirstEnergy’s claims to confidentiality. Some records the agency released, however, contain text chains between FirstEnergy CEO Charles “Chuck” Jones, company executive Mike Dowling, and Randazzo.
FirstEnergy declined to comment on the dispute beyond its legal arguments. The OCC declined a request to further characterize the records in question.The recent dispute follows a larger pattern of both FirstEnergy and the PUCO resisting public disclosures into the details of the passage of HB 6 and the full scope of Randazzo’s conduct, allegedly on the company’s behalf.
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