At Oneida Business Committee’s Friday July 12, 2013 open working meeting – which was by their own admission an out-of-the-ordinary reaction to the submission of a petition and was not announced on the Tribe’s GroupWise notification system – new questions were raised but one mystery was perhaps solved.
Specifically, The Mystery of Green Bay Renewable Energy.
According to Council member Brandon Stevens, who is also OBC Liaison to OSGC, Green Bay Renewable Energy, LLC, and Oneida Energy Blocker Corp. are wholly owned by Oneida Seven Generations Corporation.
Both entities were established in Delaware on December 15, 2011 and therefore should have been included in OSGC’s Disclosure Report as of December 31, 2011, which was included in the February 22, 2012 OBC Regular meeting packet. However, the existence of these entities – along with a host of other information required to be included by the Corporate Report Model of OSGC’s Charter – was entirely missing.
Which raises the question: Why did the Tribal Secretary publish in the February 22, 2012 OBC Regular Meeting packet a document that is supposed to be kept confidential according to the Chief Counsel’s February 15, 2011 legal opinion on such matters?
Secretary Hoeft has said that she published what OSGC sent for inclusion in the meeting packet, which included the Disclosure Report. Chief Counsel House claimed on Friday July 12, 2013 that OSGC mistakenly sent the Disclosure Report to the Tribal Secretary’s office for publication.
Which raises these questions:
- Is it the responsibility of the Tribal Secretary to screen submissions to ensure that confidential reports are not published inadvertently?
- Did Sec. Hoeft contact OSGC to confirm whether they intended to include the Disclosure Report in the OBC Meeting packet?
In any case, GTC should give a hearty round of thanks to both OSGC and Sec. Hoeft, for without their actions it may never have come to light just how abysmally OSGC has failed to fulfill the obligations of their Corporate Report Model resulting in such a glaringly insufficient Disclosure Report as the one published by accident in February 2012 that omitted the establishment of Green Bay Renewable Energy, LLC, and Oneida Energy Blocker Corp. in December 2011.
Which likely explains why OSGC and OBC don’t want GTC to have access to subsequent Disclosure Reports and raises more questions still:
- Who is responsible for ensuring that OSGC submits updated Disclosure Reports to OBC every time there is a substantial change to the board membership and personnel, as well as when any new entities are formed by OSGC, as is required by the Corporate Report Model?
- Who is responsible for assuring the accuracy and adequacy of the information provided in OSGC’s Disclosure Report?
- What steps, if any, are taken by OBC once they learn that OSGC has failed to provide an adequate Disclosure Report?
- If – as Chief Counsel House now maintains in contradiction to her February 15, 2011 published legal opinion – GTC members do not have a legal nor legitimate need to have access to OSGC’s Disclosure Reports, who are the Disclosure Reports actually for?
- Without a new written legal opinion from the Chief Counsel reversing her February 15, 2011 legal opinion, how did the Tribal Secretary determine that GTC members should not have access to Disclosure Reports?
Mysteries still abound.
