FirstEnergy on Tuesday announced it had reached an agreement with Icahn Capital to add two of the conglomerate’s employees as new members to the utility’s board of directors, effective this Thursday.
FirstEnergy in February announced during an analyst call that it had learned that Carl Icahn was buying up to $920 million of its shares. Icahn had not contacted the company at that point. (See FirstEnergy Shares Jump on Icahn Investment.)
The agreement to expand the board to include Icahn’s representatives also “provides that Mr. Icahn and his associates will not exercise substantial influence or control over FirstEnergy or any of its subsidiaries,” the company said in a release.
The announcement came just hours after former U.S. Attorney David DeVillers, in remarks before the governing board of the Ohio Consumers’ Counsel, made it clear that the investigation is continuing into how former Ohio House Speaker Larry Householder and four associates orchestrated the 2019 passage of House Bill 6, creating a $1.3 billion public bailout of nuclear power plants previously owned by FirstEnergy.
Noting that the grand jury investigating the case had been in recess from November until March 1 because of a spike in COVID-19 cases, DeVillers said the probe is now active again, with the grand jury meeting weekly.
“I suspect that you’re going to hear a bit more about that case, in regards to the other side of things. … You have an indictment and you have five or six people in it … and after the indictment, the investigation doesn’t stop,” he said.
“And if they find more people that may be involved through the superseding indictment, and more individuals are added to that indictment or more charges are added to the indictment, that’s not unusual and specifically not unusual in the present case,” he said.
In response to a question from Consumers’ Counsel Bruce Weston, DeVillers also said that corporations can be charged and, if found guilty, can be fined. Often corporations at that point cooperate in order to lessen the fines, he said.
FirstEnergy’s board in recent months has fired five top executives, including former CEO Charles Jones, who was appointed in 2015 after his predecessor, Anthony Alexander, abruptly left the company.
As DeVillers began his remarks, he noted that he had just learned that one of the five people his office had indicted in the HB 6 investigation had been found dead.
Neil Clark, 67, indicted on federal racketeering conspiracy charges in July 2020 along with Householder and three associates, was found dead Monday in a parked car near Naples, Fla. A handgun was found in the car. An autopsy is pending.
Clark had insisted he was innocent of the charges even after two others pleaded guilty in October 2020. He was a long-time Columbus, Ohio, lobbyist and former budget director for the Ohio Republican caucus. In October he announced he was writing a “tell-all” book about his years in the lobbying business.