by Steve Haner

I have been charged with defaming a great Virginia company and major employer. One of my regular readers high up in Dominion Energy Virginia, someone often complimentary of my efforts, called yesterday to push back on any implication from me that the company is corrupt or engages in corrupt practices. 

The basic point of the column from four days ago, “Dominion Sale is a Warning Sign on Virginia’s Weak Ethics Laws”, was that Virginia’s General Assembly should impose campaign finance limits across the board, along with other specific legal recommendations to limit corporate influence at the Capitol or improve utility regulation. The focus was indeed on Dominion. 

After pointing out that many of the methods of political persuasion used by NextEra Energy and Dominion are similar, methods I and others have complained about, I wrote “Virginia must fight the corruption across the board.” Yep, with that I applied the word to the company. “Guard against” would have been a better choice than “fight.” Or “overwhelming special interest influence” could have replaced “corruption.”

The word was used two other times. In the opening I summarized somebody else’s argument that the new, combined entity would be so politically powerful that it could corrupt the state’s politics. At the end, I offered my own opinion that the lax laws and rules I would reform now “invite” corruption. Neither of those can be read as calling the company corrupt. That power tends to corrupt is not an opinion I will surrender. But that one time I did apply the word to Dominion. 

A key component of the formal definition of corruption in this sense is to do something illegal. I made and make no accusation that Dominion has done anything illegal in this realm in my long years of observation. That is the problem. The huge flow of campaign cash, the strategic charitable giving, the legislative three card monte and the efforts to restrict public access to key parts of regulatory files are entirely legal. 

Much of what we know about Dominion’s activities is because of its own disclosures. If the disclosures are not as detailed as they could be, that is due to the weakness of the disclosure rules themselves. To the best of my knowledge, the company follows the law and probably discloses far more than other big players at the Assembly.  

Therefore, it is not corrupt and does not to my knowledge engage in corrupt practices. It merely exercises its rights under the law to use its resources to increase its success in the legislative and regulatory realm as it advocates for shareholder value. I’m sure that makes all my readers feel way better about what is going on in Virginia and what is coming down the pike. If they remain concerned, the six-bullet reform agenda is still a good place to start, if windmill-tilting is their idea of fun.