Amid allegations of the utility’s involvement in a corrupt nuclear bailout bill, FirstEnergy on Thursday fired CEO Charles Jones and two senior executives after an internal review determined they broke company rules.
Steven Strah, FirstEnergy’s president, will fill Jones’ position, according to a press release announcing the termination. Christopher Pappas, a current board member, has been appointed executive director.
The executives “violated certain FirstEnergy policies and its code of conduct”, according to the release. Jones had been the company’s CEO since 2015.
Also terminated were Dennis Chack, senior vice president of product development, marketing, and branding, and Mike Dowling, senior vice president of external affairs.The firings are effective immediately.
FirstEnergy’s decisive personnel moves follow multiple government investigations and lawsuits against the company, which allegedly helped former Ohio House Speaker Larry Householder elect candidates to the state legislature in 2018 in a $60 million corruption scheme. FirstEnergy allegedly funnelled millions of dollars in dark money payments to support the passage of House Bill 6, which bailed out two plants owned by Energy Harbor, a former FirstEnergy subsidiary.
They also come the same day two members of Householder’s political team — lobbyist Juan Cespedes and Jeffrey Longstreth, a Householder campaign strategist — pled guilty in federal Ohio court.
Householder, a Republican, was indicted in July alongside Cespedes, Longstreth and two others close to his campaign — lobbyist Neil Clark and former Ohio GOP Chairman Matt Borges.
Cespedes and Longstreth, who could both face up to 20 years in prison, are now free to testify against Householder and the others in court.
“Today’s guilty pleas by Longstreth & Cespedes move the HB6 racketeering scandal from allegation to admitted fact,” Ohio Attorney General David Yost said in a Twitter statement following the pleas Thursday. “The only remaining question: ‘who else?’ My team, including a forensic accountant, is going through the first batch of documents in our civil racketeering lawsuit.”
FirstEnergy will release financial results for the third quarter and first nine months of the year on Monday. The conference call with financial analysts to discuss these results will take place at 9 a.m. EST that day.
