By John Stang
An Ohio grand jury returned numerous indictments Friday against two former FirstEnergy Corp. executives — including ousted CEO Charles “Chuck” Jones — plus the disgraced former head of the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio.
This is the latest fallout from a scandal dating back to 2019 involving two financially struggling Ohio reactors, $60 million in bribes, laundered money, and a 20-year prison sentence for the former speaker of Ohio’s House of Representatives. All this revolved around the since-revoked House Bill 6, which increased utility rates to prop two plants owned by a former FirstEnergy subsidiary.
On Monday, Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost announced that a Summit County grand jury returned felony indictments against Jones, Randazzo and FirstEnergy lobbyist Michael Dowling. Indictments were also announced against two businesses controlled by Randazzo. Akron, home of FirstEnergy Corp., is also the county seat of Summit County. The trio was scheduled to be arraigned Tuesday.
“This indictment is about more than one piece of legislation,” Yost said in a Monday press release. “It is about the hostile capture of a significant portion of Ohio’s state government by deception, betrayal and dishonesty. Shout it from the public square to the boardroom, from Wall Street to Broad and High: Those who perversely seek to turn the government to their own private ends will face the destruction of everything they worked for.”
The charges date back to 2010, according to the 50-page indictment.
Randazzo faces 22 counts of corruption, grand theft, aggravated theft, bribery, telecommunications fraud, money laundering and tampering with records. One Randazzo corporation — the Sustainability Funding Alliance of Ohio— faces 11 of the same charges. Another Randazzo corporation — the IEU-Ohio Administration — faces another five of the same charges.
Jones faces 10 counts of corruption, aggravated theft, bribery telecommunications fraud and money laundering. Dowling faces 12 counts of corruption, aggravated theft, bribery, telecommunications fraud, money laundering and tampering with records.
In addition to Monday’s charge, Randazzo already faces one count of conspiring to commit travel act bribery and honest services wire fraud, two counts of travel act bribery, two counts of honest services wire fraud, one count of wire fraud and five counts of making illegal monetary transactions, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office.
Randazzo was the PUCO chairman from April 2019 until November 2020, when he resigned.
In the federal case, the U.S. attorney alleges that Akron-based FirstEnergy Corp. — former owners of the power reactors at Davis-Besse Nuclear Power Station and Perry Nuclear Power Plant — paid $4.3 million to Randazzo for favorable actions while he was PUCO’s chairman. If convicted as charged, Randazzo faces up to 20 years in prison.
This is an offshoot of a major Ohio scandal in which the former state House Speaker Larry Householder was sentenced to 20 years in prison for his involvement in the $60 million bribery scheme that produced House Bill 6.
