In one of his last filings as a Corporation Commissioner following 36 years in the elective-statewide office, Bob Anthony stated he believes he has uncovered more evidence of wrongdoing regarding the bond securitization used by utilities following the 2021 Winter Storm Uri.
He also accused Commissioner Todd Hiett and General administrator Brandy Wreath, who was OCC Public Utility Division Director at the time, of secretly helping write the very law that aided the utilities and required customers to pay off the bonds for more than 25 years.
Anthony calls Hiett and Wreath “securitization snake oil salesmen” and says he cannot find any documentation supporting the “$600 million to $1 billion” of customer savings Hiett and Wreath predicted would result from using bonds to spread out the 2021 Winter Storm costs.
“We now know that representatives of the Corporation Commission, including Commissioner Todd Hiett and OCC PUD Director Brandy Wreath, not only misled lawmakers in an effort to promote the securitization legislation, some of them even colluded with utility company representatives to do it,” wrote Anthony in his filing.
(Todd Hiett)
He also accused Hiett and Wreath of “manipulating” storm costs and colluding with one ONG/ONE Gas employee to invent “mock bills” to inflate the estimates given to legislators to scare them and the governor into supporting securitization and passing the Securitization Act quickly.
(Brandy Wreath)
OK Energy Today had not received any response from Commissioner Hiett and Administrator Wreath to requests for reaction or comment to Anthony’s latest allegations.
“I am sad to report that evidence revealed since my September 2022 ‘Report Card’ has only further confirmed the suspicions I raised in it,” Anthony writes. “I am also sad to report that there is no publicly available evidence of any investigation other than my own into any of the bond-related wrongdoing I have described – wrongdoing that, by my estimation, is costing Oklahoma utility ratepayers billions more than they would be paying if the state officials charged with protecting them from such special interest scams had done their duties.”
Anthony is term-limited and will be succeeded by former state Senate President Pro-Tempore Brian Bingham on Monday, creating a Corporation Commission comprised of former state House and Senate leaders.
On the last full business day of his 36-year tenure as an Oklahoma Corporation Commissioner, Friday, January 10, Commissioner Anthony filed a 29-page opinion with 57 pages of attachments he titled, “2021’s Winter Storm ‘Uri’ and the $5 Billion Securitization Scam: What We Know, What We Don’t Know, and Why We Don’t Know It.”
The report is a follow-up to a 74-page report Anthony filed about the 2021 Winter Storm in September 2022 that he called, “A Report Card on Securitization: Anatomy of a State Government Screw-Up.”
In his new report, Anthony offers updates to suspicions he raised and allegations he made in his 2022 exposé, and describes evidence of “more possible wrongdoing” that has come to light since.
Anthony’s new report includes more than 100 footnotes to his earlier filings on many of the topics he recaps, including millions of dollars in issuance cost discrepancies surrounding the bond deals and OCC audits he says did not comply with state law.
In his 2022 “Report Card,” Anthony described evidence appearing to show that an executive of OG&E and the Deputy Treasurer for Debt Management had conspired to rig the hiring of the OCC’s financial advisor on the bond deals because OG&E didn’t like the advisor that the Florida commission had recommended to the OCC.
Under “What We Know” in this latest filing, Anthony writes, “Letting OG&E improperly and perhaps unlawfully influence the selection of the OCC’s financial advisor was the single most expensive failing of this experimental securitization enterprise.” He goes on to describe that financial advisor’s involvement in the alleged rigging of RFPs for the bond underwriters, and “fraudulent” language changes made to the bonds’ financing orders that Anthony alleges made them hundreds of millions of dollars more expensive for ratepayers.
Anthony attaches multiple emails and other documents he says he has obtained since his 2022 filing – some of it marked “confidential” – that he describes not just as evidence but, in one case, as “a smoking gun with the financial advisor’s fingerprints on the trigger.”
New allegations in the filing include the possibility that Tulsa-based BOK Financial may have been given roles on all of the bond deals as a “pork barrel patronage.”
Several emails also show Commissioner Todd Hiett and his staff as well as then-OCC Public Utility Division Director Brandy Wreath helping draft the securitization legislation in March and April 2021 while at the same time keeping it secret from Commissioners Anthony and Dana Murphy – even after Murphy repeatedly asked to see a draft.
The emails also show Hiett personally ordered edits to a now-controversial PowerPoint presentation given by Wreath at an April 2021 press conference introducing the legislation. According to Anthony, those edits eliminated “all but the most absurd financing alternatives to securitization” and were made to scare lawmakers into supporting the legislation.
In a section entitled “What We Don’t Know and Why We Don’t Know It,” Anthony describes possible violations of the Open Records Act by multiple state agencies he accuses of being part of “the 2021 Winter Storm coverup cabal.” He also recaps in detail what he calls the OCC’s ongoing “disinformation campaign” that, as recently as this week, continues to put out statements claiming that the multi-billion-dollar bonds deals resulted in “savings” for utility customers and denying the bonds’ $1.13 billion cost overrun versus the OCC’s original 2021-2022 published estimates of what they would cost.
Anthony continues to call for law enforcement investigations into potential public corruption and criminal wrongdoing, as well as audits of the 2021 Winter Storm bonds compliant with state statutes. He writes, “Try as others might, the truth will not stay buried. Regardless of whether the wrongdoers are ever held accountable, the public that will be paying these billions for decades deserves to know what happened – during two weeks in February 2021 and in the years since.”
“Truth and justice have a habit of being unrelenting,” Anthony concludes. “I have heard it said that I do too.”
Read Commissioner Anthony’s full January 10, 2025 “What We Know” filing here:
https://public.occ.ok.gov/WebLink/DocView.aspx?id=17410751
Read Anthony’s original September 2022 “Report Card on Securitization” filing here: https://public.occ.ok.gov/WebLink/DocView.aspx?id=12294753.
Read Commissioner Anthony’s January 3, 2025 “Reflections on 36 Years at OCC” filing here:
https://public.occ.ok.gov/WebLink/DocView.aspx?id=17388334