In the months after FirstEnergy reaped the fruits of what prosecutors say was a bribery scheme, CEO Chuck Jones moved to sell $10 million in company shares to buy a home in Florida, an email shown at his bribery trial shows. 

In early April of 2020, Jones wrote to his financial adviser that he informed the company’s board of directors that he planned to liquidate some of the company shares he received as compensation. He planned to sell 200,000 shares when the stock price hit $50. 

That would have left his remaining holdings in the company just under $30 million, he wrote. 

“So I would effectively be transacting on one third at this time,” Jones said. “When it happens we would want to put the proceeds somewhere that are very liquid as we are getting close to purchasing our ultimate retirement home in Naples [Florida].”

At the heart of the state’s dozens of charges is that Jones and Mike Dowling, the company’s senior vice president of external affairs, paid $4.3 million to Sam Randazzo, a lawyer, shortly before Gov. Mike DeWine appointed Randazzo as Chairman of the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio in early 2019. 

The company also paid Randazzo millions of dollars under a consulting services agreement in the years prior, when he served on the PUCO’s nominating council, curating a short list from which the governor makes appointments. 

The PUCO regulates utility companies and effectively sets customer prices and company profits. As chairman, Randazzo, who sets the agency’s agenda and tends to steer its decisions, did three key things to benefit FirstEnergy.

• He led a decision to avert the company from a regulatory rate review, which Director of Rates Eileen Mikkelsen, who signed an immunity deal and testified against Jones, testified saved the company $150 million
• He approved a “decoupling” proposal from the company, worth tens of millions more for the company
• He drafted and lobbied for House Bill 6, legislation that gave FirstEnergy a ratepayer-funded $1.3 billion bailout for its fledgling nuclear plants. 

Those items were all finalized between roughly July and November of 2019. Prosecutors have previously noted that the overwhelming majority of Jones’ compensation was incentive-based and not salaried. This means his personal wealth rose and fell with FirstEnergy’s. 

On the heels of those successes for the company, Jones sought to convert his shares to cash, the emails show. By his math, the tax liability on the sale would be about $400,000, but he asked for advice on how to whittle that down. 

“We can talk about whether to use the proceeds to pay cash for the new Naples home or a low rate mortgage once we see where interest rates settle after this pandemic slows and once we have found the property,” he wrote. 

Jones didn’t ultimately execute the sale. At trial Friday, Judge Susan Baker Ross read to the jurors a statement, agreed to by both parties, telling them that because the company’s share price didn’t hit $50 in the time period, Jones didn’t sell the shares. 

Regardless, Jones received $20.8 million in realized compensation in 2019, according to securities filings shown to jurors earlier in the trial. 

Jones and Dowling have both pleaded not guilty. Their attorneys (17 on the case are shared between them) have argued that the $4.3 million wasn’t a bribe. Rather, it terminated remaining years of payments due under a consulting services agreement, which served as the vehicle for a PUCO case settlement between FirstEnergy and Randazzo’s legal clients. The defendants say Randazzo, who died by suicide in 2024 while under state and federal indictment, stole the money from his clients.

The trial began in late January and is expected to continue well into next month.