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Secretary of State Rex Tillerson Allegedly Used Email Alias As Exxon CEO (arstechnica.com)
According to New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, Rex Tillerson used an email alias of "Wayne Tracker" to communicate with other Exxon executives about climate change while serving as CEO of Exxon Mobil. "New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman has been leading an investigation of Exxon Mobil centered on whether the company misled investors by publicly arguing against the reality of climate change even though its executives knew the science was accurate," reports Ars Technica. "The investigation was triggered by news reports describing climate research the company undertook in the 1970s and 1980s, which affirmed the work of other climate scientists and showed that greenhouse gas emissions were causing climate change. Exxon buried that work and spent the next couple decades claiming that the science was unclear, although it has recently publicly acknowledged reality." From the report: The e-mails that were provided allowed the attorney general to figure out that Tillerson used the account between 2008 and 2015 at least, but it didn't appear on Exxon's list of accounts for which records were preserved. The letter also mentions 34 other e-mail accounts "specifically assigned to top executives, board members, or assistants" that the attorney general thinks should have been included. In a statement, an Exxon spokesperson explained, "The e-mail address, Wayne.Tracker@exxonmobil.com, is part of the company's e-mail system and was put in place for secure and expedited communications between select senior company officials and the former chairman for a broad range of business-related topics." The Office of the Attorney General's letter claims that "Exxon has continuously delayed and obstructed the production of documents from its top executives and board members, which are crucial to OAG's investigation into Exxon's touted risk-management practices regarding climate change."
and I approve of this message.
Wow this story has:
AGW? check
Trump? check.
EMAILS!? check.
Which means I need:
popcorn? popcorn? Not check?!? No popcorn! Sad.
Someone had to do it.
Dude had IT set him up another account so he could surf porn... who hasn't?
it could not, a company is not animate. People do things on behalf of the company. Thus it is people who misled investors, etc.
The difference is important because all too often they will let the company/corporation pick up the blame for what they did and pay any fines. Until executives start losing their homes and pensions their behaviour will not change, we will continue to see scandals such as this. I am not talking about making executives paying for mistakes, even bad ones, but for deliberate lies/... such as this.
But there IS a law about not informing investors of potential liability issues, which is the actual issue the AG's are investigating. No ones 'opinions' are being criminalized. The active efforts to evade the law is, however.
Sorry to rain facts on your strawman parade of butthurt.
Moron.... private company != Government
I can create all the email account I want for my company ... the Government has no constitutional power to complain.
The witch hunt to file some sort of criminal complaint because I dare to talk about climate change or deny climate change.. is simply that.
The problem isn't that he used a secret email address.
The problem is that he used that secret email address to hide communications.
Those communications were allegedly about a scheme to mislead the public (and investors) about the state of climate science.
Misleading investors with information you know to be false is a bad thing because it causes them to make investments based on your lies, if those emails show that Tillerson knew he was lying it could be a very bad thing.
I stole this Sig
They aren't being charged with using an "email alias", but obstruction for not turning over email being used to conduct company business. Did they use the email alias to conduct business? If yes, turn over the email. It is all part of the discovery process.
Moron.... private company != Government
I can create all the email account I want for my company ... the Government has no constitutional power to complain.
The witch hunt to file some sort of criminal complaint because I dare to talk about climate change or deny climate change.. is simply that.
Except that Exxon Mobil is not a private company. Its stock is sold in various currencies on numerous exchanges around the world.
The executives of a publicly-traded company have a legal fiduciary responsibility to inform shareholders of potential risks to the company's profitability. Trying to bury their own evidence that their products contribute to climate change arguably is a violation of that responsibility. Hence the investigation by the AGs.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
The people who are ruling our world are really a bunch of lying jackoffs. All the money, all the power, but they're still lying jackoffs.
You are welcome on my lawn.
sounds agreeable enough. However if you are subpoenaed for your emails and you fail to report both, that is when it gets interesting.
Considering that it's likely fossil fuel companies have had positive knowledge of AGW for decades, and that eventually he twill lead to significant regulation both nationally and internationally, yes shareholders, and just as importantly potential shareholders have a right to know.
This would be like a gold mine selling futures while having buried reports showing water table contamination that could potentially depress share prices.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
So every company needs to officially warn their investors about global warming, rising tides, and ocean acidification?
If those things can materially affect the profitability of the company, then yes. And especially if the company knows that it is contributing to them, thus making itself vulnerable to legislative or liability consequences.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
Sorry for posting AC, but I wanted to create a good run-on sentence that would not be attributed to myself.
If you, as a company, are aware that Global Climate Change is a significant problem that could impact your business and you have done the research that proves it, then YES, lying to the shareholders about it is a crime.
It's not the crime, it's the coverup. This is the kind of crap that gets people sent to jail.
It's not about the science, it's about what Exxon did:
If their internal research showed one thing, but they publicly declared something something opposite, that's pretty bad, but probably not criminal.
If they testified in a court that they believed the opposite factoids, and didn't mention the internal research, that's really bad, but if the opposing lawyers didn't find the right person to testify (like someone at Exxon who knew about the research,) they are probably still ok.
If they set up secret email accounts for senior executives, and then didn't provide the emails from those accounts to the opposing lawyers during the discovery process, then that's just fraud on the court. It's like your wife "forgetting" to mention her secret bank account in the Cayman Islands during your divorce trial. Seriously, WTF?
Weather is not climate. You do understand what the "global" in global warming means, right? You did get far enough in school to learn about average and mean, it I assume so.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
And tell me that Exxon's $175 million 'put into trust for Tillerson', isn't really a payoff to leverage his position in government.
I'm sure we should just turn a blind eye to this, except Exxon's major investments are in Siberian oil fields and so *it* has to be Putin's bitch, which means Tillerson has to be Putin's bitch too.
But hey, sell your country out for your own interests Tillerson.
If a small company was being investigated and their emails were significant to the crime, then there would be no problem with grabbing everything despite the damage that it would do to the small firm. Yet when a big firm is being investigated, they are free to hand over what they feel like. A similar problem was visible when News International was done in the UK over its phone hacking behaviour. A little less subtly from prosecutors would be welcome!
So every company needs to officially warn their investors about global warming, rising tides, and ocean acidification? Because otherwise the investors will be unaware of these problems? Should they also have to warn them about the possibility of an asteroid strike? A global pandemic? A robot uprising?
Quite possibly, if they've invested significant amounts of the company's monies in those issues AND gotten results that show there is a concern.
You do realize that this is the sort of thing companies DO have to deal with, and Exxon's OWN actions indicate their liability.
I am a shareholder in a S&P index fund. So I should have received 500 warnings about global warming. I have received zero. Why isn't the NY AG going after the other 499?
I wouldn't know, perhaps many of those other 499 are being investigated. Wells Fargo, for example has taken a recent hit for some of its actions. And Merck got in BIG trouble for what they did with regards to VIOXX risks. So did Trump University. Volkswagen just got hit. And dozens more.
Whether or not you've gotten your required disclosures or not, I can't say, maybe you merely failed to access them yourself.
This is not about "failure to inform investors". It is about a liberal witchhunt against a company that defied their official dogma.
Defying dogma? Or deliberately concealing information, misleading the public, and otherwise behaving like criminals? Because all of your reaction doesn't seem to grasp what they actually did. You seem more aggrieved that once again, one of the corporations that are sitting on top of the world has had its dirty laundry revealed.
Disclaimer: I think global warming is real, and what Exxon did was reprehensible.
So you claim. Yet you're making excuses for them. This does not make you believable. It makes you less credible.
But expressing an opinion should not be a crime.
Really? Have you thought this over?
Consider the following:
Opinion: I like pie. I eat pie everyday. Yum.
Opinion: I believe this Pie is not poisonous. Have a bite.
Think about it again. Then think some more.
Russia is neither here nor there. They may have influence, they may not. What matters is that some state-level intelligence agency was able to disrupt the American electoral process. That's bad no matter what team you play for. Not only that, but now that it has been successful, do you think that will result in more attempts or fewer? And tell me, exactly how expensive is it to set up a team of hackers?
Russia is the least of our problems.
Oh? So this article was not in relation to the Clinton investigation? It was just a mentioning that a CEO of a private company had a non-work email? It had no relation to Clinton and that's why my bringing it up is a non sequitur, right? Just trying to understand what you are implying here.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
It's impossible to have a meaningful discussion on climate change without socialism.
No, you've picked up a cheap trick from the denialist crowd which sounds convincing but is wrong. It's an argument in the gamut of "we don't know, the evidence isn't there, the evidence is fiddled, ok the evidence is right but we don't know people are doing it and finally it's too political to discuss properly".
SJW n. One who posts facts.
I don't think the parent poster understands the risks that global warming has to fossil fuel companies like Exxon and Koch Industries. These companies entire market capitalization is based on the in the ground resources. If those in ground resources will never be extracted than Exxon and Koch Industries aren't worth 10% of their current market value.
If the companies executives knew about this risk that fuels in the ground will never be extracted and failed to tell investors they've committed fraud. The kind of investing fraud that bankrupts companies and can get people sent to jail. As an aside this is what the divestment movement is about, people want their retirement accounts and government monies removed from investing in these companies because at some point when the market actually realizes all that carbon that makes Exxon and Koch Industries worth Billions will never be extracted those stock prices are going to crash and people invested in them are going to lose their shirts.