The sad failure of the V.C. Summer nuclear project in South Carolina appears to be a never-ending tale of woe, intrigue, and crime. In the latest development, the federal and state criminal sentencing of the former CEO of the now defunct investor-owned utility SCANA, Kevin Marsh, originally scheduled for late last year, has been postponed.
Marsh agreed in November to plead guilty to federal and state charges. He faces a likely jail sentence. Marsh, 65, was scheduled to plead guilty to federal conspiracy fraud charges and state charges of “obtaining a signature or property by false pretenses of a value of $10,000 or more.”
The U.S. attorney for South Carolina said the postponement was “due to logistics” and said it will be rescheduled. In July, another former SCANA executive, Steven Byrne, entered a guilty plea to conspiracy charges and is now out on bond.
SCANA, then the state’s largest energy utility, consistently lied to state regulators, federal securities regulators, and the public about the troubles at the two-unit, 2,000-MW nuclear construction project as it fell further and further behind schedule and costs escalated out of control. They, and partner state-owned public power system Santee Cooper, pulled the plug in 2017, with the project half built.
Last year the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filed civil fraud charges against both March and Byrne, alleging they defrauded investors by making false claims about the progress of the project.
The failure of the project meant the death of SCANA, as it was bought up by Virginia’s Dominion Energy. It could also mean the end of Santee Cooper, one of the nation’s largest and oldest public power systems. It dates back to the 1930s Great Depression, when then Democratic Gov. Strom Thurmond, later an extremely conservative Republic Senator, created it, emulating Franklin Roosevelt’s creation of the New York Power Authority when he was New York’s governor.
Santee Cooper has been lobbying the state legislature not to sell off its generation and transmission business, which sells power to state rural electric cooperatives to distribute to their retail customers. FITSNews, the feisty state-wide website that follows politics in the Palmetto State, reported late last year, “South Carolina lawmakers are livid over the involvement of a prominent contract lobbyist in the latest round of discussions over what’s to be done with government-run power provider Santee Cooper.
“Not only that, they believe the lobbyist’s involvement was part of a preemptive effort aimed at mitigating the damage caused when the debt-addled utility’s chief executive officer failed to show for a recent legislative hearing.”
Santee Cooper CEO Mark Bonsall, former head of Arizona’s large public power system Salt River Project, who was hired after Santee Cooper cleaned out its executive suite in the aftermath of the Summer follies, and is paid over $1 million/year, ducked a December meeting with the S.C. House ways and means committee, saying he was on a family vacation back in Arizona. Bonsall retired after 40 years at the Arizona utility. Santee Cooper hired him in mid-2019, at twice wat he was getting paid at SRP.
A prominent state lobbyist, Fred Allen, who is not a registered lobbyist for Santee Cooper according to FITSNews, tried and failed to arrange a Bonsall phone meeting with legislators before his scheduled meeting with the ways and means committee. The news service reported, “State representative Leon Stavrinakis of Charleston, S.C., referred to Bonsall blowing off the hearing as ‘a sad example of a deficient sense of fiduciary responsibility to the people of South Carolina, their ratepayers and their employees.’”
The legislature is likely to take up the fate of the statewide public power system this year. Hugh Leatherman, president of the state senate, and a recent opponent of Santee Cooper has announced the creation of a special subcommittee to review the future of the embattled utility.
–Kennedy Maize
kenmaize@gmail.com