The Ohio Legislature’s speaker of the House and four others have been charged with funneling roughly $60 million in bribes and illegal contributions to a three-year secret campaign to subsidize two financially struggling nuclear power plants in the state.
House Speaker Larry Householder (R), a political adviser, and three lobbyists face federal charges of racketeering conspiracy, which carries a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison. Also charged was a 501(c)(4) social welfare entity named Generation Now, reportedly controlled by Householder, through which money from an entity cited as Company A was allegedly laundered.
Local reporting identified Company A as FirstEnergy Corp., former parent of FirstEnergy Solutions Corp., which owned the nuclear plants.
“All forms of public corruption are unacceptable,” said FBI Cincinnati Special Agent in Charge Chris Hoffman in a federal press release. “When the corruption is alleged to reach some of the highest levels of our state government, the citizens of Ohio should be shocked and appalled.”
According to an FBI affidavit filed July 17 and unsealed Tuesday in federal court, the racketeering charges revolve around the Davis-Besse Nuclear Power Station in Oak Harbor and the Perry Nuclear Power Plant in Perry. FirstEnergy Solutions — which declared bankruptcy 2018 and then later split from FirstEnergy Corp. to become Energy Harbor — has owned the reactors.
FirstEnergy Solutions had planned to retire the reactors, respectively by May 2020 and May 2021, because it did not have the money to operate them economically. Instead, the Ohio Legislature last year passed a bill to provide a $150 million annual financial bailout to the power plants.
The suspects worked to ensure the bill made it through the legislature, then “worked to corruptly” ensure its survival against a referendum intended to undo the legislation, the Department of Justice said.
Among the claims in the criminal complaint: Householder allegedly received $250,000 payments each quarter starting in March 2017 from energy companies through a Generation Now bank account. The suspects also expended millions of dollars from the companies in support of Householder’s selection as House speaker, authorities said. Through March of this year, they allegedly received millions more to promote House Bill 6.
Both FirstEnergy and Energy Harbor said they are fully cooperating with the federal probe.
