Facing a growing Ohio nuclear bribery and racketeering scandal, Akron-based utility giant FirstEnergy has fired its long-time CEO. Last Thursday (Oct 29), the multi-billion dollar company issued a press release saying the board has terminated Chuck Jones, CEO since 2015 and a company employee since 1978, according to Akron Beacon Journal. Jones, 63, is an Akron native.
FirstEnergy also fired Dennis Chack, senior vice president of product development and marketing, and Mike Dowling, senior vice president of external affairs. The company did not elaborate on the details of the firings.
The utility acted shortly after two associates of disgraced former Ohio House Speaker Larry Householder entered guilty pleas in federal court in Cincinnati to racketeering. The FBI in July charged that Householder took $60 million in bribes from FirstEnergy in exchange for passage of an Ohio law, House Bill 6, that rescued two economically uncompetitive FirstEnergy nuclear power plants, Perry and Davis Besse. Householder was ousted from the speakership, the second time in his long Republican political career.
Cleveland.com reported that Jeffrey Longstreth, a longtime Householder aide, and Juan Cespedes, a FirstEnergy lobbyist, pled guilty “hours after federal prosecutors filed plea agreements.” The men are free on bond and the federal judge in the case, Timothy Black, set no trial date, saying he is waiting until the case “is more fully resolved,” suggesting that other arrests or pleas are likely.
Longstreth’s plea acknowledges that he set up a fake nonprofit called Generation Now to channel money from FirstEnergy to Householder for “passage and preservation of legislation that would go into effect and save the operation of two nuclear power plants in Ohio.” The FBI said Cespedes was key to getting the legislation enacted, coordinating payments to Generation Now and orchestrating a media and advertising campaign to get the law passed.
Cespedes also worked to sink a ballot initiative to kill House Bill 6, according to the court documents, along with two other lobbyists, Neil Clark and Matthew Borges. Clark and Borges have denied the allegations.
In a Securities and Exchange Commission filing, FirstEnergy said that “each of the terminated executives forfeits or is otherwise ineligible to receive any grants, awards, or compensation pursuant to the company’s Short-Term Incentive Program, the 2015 Incentive Compensation Plan, or the 2020 Incentiv Compensation Plan.” The company also said it is considering “whether recoupment, reductions or forfeiture of other grants, awards, and compensation may be warranted.”
That may not turn Jones into a pauper. Cleveland.com reported that a shareholder’s lawsuit in federal court says “that Jones and other top executives at FirstEnergy sold off millions of dollars of company stock from March 1, 2017 to March 1, 2020.” Jones sold 148,302 shares on March 1, 2019, earning $6 million, according to the filings.
— Kennedy Maize