Mysterious, Powerful Lobbying Group Won’t Say Whom It Works For
The Commercial Energy Working Group is one of Washington’s many lobbying organizations working to make government friendlier to business, but who it represents is a secret.
Beat Tschanz / CC-BY-2.0
The Commercial Energy Working Group (CEWG) is one of Washington’s many lobbying organizations that have the goal of making government friendlier to business, but who it represents is a secret.
David Dayen reports at The Intercept:
This violates federal lobbying and ethics laws, according to Public Citizen’s Tyson Slocum, who has urged the House and Senate to investigate the matter. “The Commercial Energy Working Group is one of the most active – and secret – organizations seeking to undermine energy market regulations,” Slocum told The Intercept. “The purpose of my complaint is to force the group to start identifying its membership.”
Under the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act of 2007, all lobbying organizations registered with the federal government must list the names of any business that has contributed more than $5,000 to them in any one quarter. But the CEWG “does not disclose the individual companies or entities that constitute its active membership,” according to Slocum’s letter.
The group has no web site, does not file annual reports with the IRS, and hasn’t sought incorporation in any state. It operates out of a D.C. law firm – Sutherland, Asbill & Brennan – and used the Sutherland offices as their formal business address in their initial 2013 lobbyist disclosure form. CEWG’s official lobbyists, Alexander Holtan and Blair Scott, are employees of Sutherland. …
A member of the CEWG even sits on the Energy and Environmental Markets Advisory Committee of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), which maintains federal oversight of derivatives. Ron Oppenheimer, an associate member of the advisory committee, is listed as a “Representative” of CEWG. But he actually works as a senior vice president and general counsel for Vitol, a Swiss-based derivatives trading company.
When Slocum asked Oppenheimer to disclose the membership of CEWG at a public meeting of the CFTC advisory committee last month, he refused. Oppenheimer said the working group had no plans to make that information public. …
In his letter, Slocum identified four other potential members of the CEWG, based on Freedom of Information Act disclosures. A CFTC “external meeting” with the CEWG on April 15, 2015, identifies participants from Vitol, ConocoPhillips and Royal Dutch Shell. External meetings on June 10 and July 28 similarly had Vitol’s Ron Oppenheimer and ConocoPhillips executive James Allison present. A 2013 CFTC meeting with the CEWG featured representatives of Hess Corporation and NextEra Energy Resources, in addition to Vitol and Royal Dutch Shell. …
If all of those companies contributed less than $5,000 per quarter to the lobbying organization, there would be no violation. But since the CEWG never discloses the names, Slocum is seeking a formal investigation.
—Posted by Alexander Reed Kelly.
WAIT, BEFORE YOU GO…If you're reading this, you probably already know that non-profit, independent journalism is under threat worldwide. Independent news sites are overshadowed by larger heavily funded mainstream media that inundate us with hype and noise that barely scratch the surface. We believe that our readers deserve to know the full story. Truthdig writers bravely dig beneath the headlines to give you thought-provoking, investigative reporting and analysis that tells you what’s really happening and who’s rolling up their sleeves to do something about it.
Like you, we believe a well-informed public that doesn’t have blind faith in the status quo can help change the world. Your contribution of as little as $5 monthly or $35 annually will make you a groundbreaking member and lays the foundation of our work.
Advocacy groups speak out after House leaders snub Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ro Khanna, Pramila Jayapal and others.
BlackRock Inc. is the world’s largest manager of financial assets—five times larger than Goldman Sachs. And its CEO, Larry Fink, and his team are poised to take over a Clinton Treasury Department.
Zephyr Teachout of New York, John Fetterman of Pennsylvania and Lucy Flores of Nevada want to take on Wall Street, big oil and the military-industrial complex—and they're all mounting bids for Congress.
“Clinton’s vision of financial reform neglects one part of the industry everyone agrees was an essential factor in the 2008 crisis: the credit rating agencies, which assess the worthiness of Wall Street securities for investors,” writes David Dayen at The Intercept.
An audit of land records commissioned by the Seattle City Council and leaked to local activists found that many mortgages held within the city are void, which means foreclosures based on them are illegal and unenforceable.
There are currently no responses to this article.
Be the first to respond.