Charles G. Koch

From SourceWatch

Charles G. Koch is one of the billionaire co-owners of Koch Industries. With his brother, David H. Koch, he runs the Koch Family Foundations, one of the largest single sources of funding for conservative organizations in the United States.

Mr. Koch is a director of Intrust Bank, N.A. His non-business activities include serving as chairman of the Institute for Humane Studies, the Claude R. Lambe Charitable Foundation and the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation, on the board of the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, and as a member of the Mont Pelerin Society.

Dirty Koch Industries received a $30,000,000.00 criminal fine in March 2000:

"$30 Million Settlement Approved - US v Koch U. S. District Judge Vanessa Gilmore approved the Department of Justice and State of Texas' settlement with Koch Industries for $30 million in civil penalties and an additional $5 million in supplemental environmental projects to be funded by Koch. This is the largest penalty imposed on a company under federal environmental laws, and is based upon spills of at least 41,000 barrels of oil and other petroleum, resulting in over three hundred violations of the Oil Pollution Act of 1990 in six states. The largest single spill was approximately100,000 gallons of crude oil which caused a 12-mile oil slick on Nueces Bay and Corpus Christi Bay. Eroded and broken pipelines caused the spills. Six of the spills were into ponds, lakes and rivers." [1]

During the 1990s, the firm's faulty pipelines were responsible for more than 300 oil spills in five states, prompting a penalty of $35 million. In 1996, a flawed pipeline caused an explosion outside of Dallas in which two teenagers were killed. In a lawsuit related to the deaths, a trial court returned a judgment of $376.69 million against the company.

But these lawsuits and fines accompanied many other brushes with the law. As one writer has put it, "The corporate history of Koch Industries - a company David Koch co-owns with his brother Charles --reads like a laundry list of legal disputes." Two decades ago, David and Charles bought out the shares of two other brothers, Bill and Frederick, for $1.1 billion. Bill (David's twin) and Frederick then claimed that Charles and David had misrepresented the company's value, and shortchanged them by $340 million. The dispute dragged on until last October 1999, when the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal in the case, letting stand a lower court's decision in favor of Charles and David. [2]

External links

• Bill Berkowitz, "Patron saints of right wing think tanks acquire Georgia Pacific Corp: Oil barons Charles and David Koch, two of the nation's worst environmental criminals, now control the country's largest privately held company", Working for Change, December 6, 2005.