“This indictment is about more than one piece of legislation,” Yost said Monday. Yost asked a judge in Columbus to add Jones, Dowling and Randazzo to a state-level lawsuit by his office against FirstEnergy in July 2021. The money was then used to win passage of the tainted energy bill, House Bill 6, and to conduct what authorities have said was a $38 million dirty-tricks campaign to prevent a repeal referendum from reaching the ballot. The dark money group used to funnel FirstEnergy money, Generation Now, also pleaded guilty to a racketeering charge in February 2021.Īll were accused of using the $60 million in secretly funded FirstEnergy cash to get Householder’s chosen Republican candidates elected to the House in 2018 and then to help him get elected speaker in January 2019. The third person arrested, statehouse lobbyist Neil Clark, pleaded not guilty before dying by suicide in March 2021. Lobbyist Juan Cespedes and Jeffrey Longstreth, a top Householder political strategist, pleaded guilty in October 2020 and await sentencing. attorney’s office in Cincinnati indicted three others on racketeering charges in July 2020. Monday’s indictments mark the latest development in what has been labeled the largest corruption case in Ohio history.įormer Ohio House Speaker Larry Householder was sentenced in June to 20 years in prison for his role in orchestrating the scheme, and lobbyist Matt Borges, a former chair of the Ohio Republican Party, was sentenced to five years. “It is shocking that a public prosecutor’s office would return an irresponsible indictment and have no evidence to support the charges in the indictment.” “The allegations of this indictment are completely false and are not supported by any credible evidence whatsoever,” John McCaffrey, one of his lawyers, said in a statement. He said the sum represented the final annual installment from a 2015 settlement agreement between FirstEnergy and IEU-Ohio, a trade association of large commercial energy users represented by Randazzo, and that the decision to make those payments through SFA was made by FirstEnergy’s legal and rates departments, not by Dowling himself. The indictment names two businesses he led: Industrial Energy Users-Ohio, and Sustainability Funding Alliance of Ohio, the entity through which the $4.3 million payment was made.ĭowling disputed Yost’s allegations that the payment represented any kind of a bribe, vowing to prove his innocence at trial. Mike DeWine nominated him as Ohio’s top utility regulator. Randazzo resigned in November 2020 after FBI agents searched his Columbus townhome and FirstEnergy revealed in security filings that it had paid him $4.3 million for his future help at the commission a month before Republican Gov. Jones, Dowling and Randazzo face a combined 27 new felony counts announced by Yost, including bribery, theft, engaging in corrupt activity, tampering with records and money laundering. Monday’s announcement also included additional charges against Sam Randazzo, former chair of the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio, who is already facing 11 counts of charges centered around allegations he accepted bribes from Akron-based FirstEnergy Corp. Both he and Dowling were scheduled to be arraigned Tuesday. Jones said through his attorney that he was in Akron when the comment was made, awaiting instructions from the court as to how to proceed. Yost said a grand jury in Summit County, home to Akron, indicted Jones and Dowling on Friday and that the two men promised to turn themselves in Monday to the Summit County Jail but then did not.
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