by Andrew Walden
How to Divide Hawaiians from their Money? Put the charges on their electric bill.
Our July 14 article: “After Receiving Campaign Cash, OHA Trustees Give $1.25M to Insolvent Geothermal Company” really hit a nerve.
Contradicting her lender, Patricia K. Brandt, CEO of Innovations Development Group (IDG), in a September 3, 2013 letter, claims IDG is not insolvent. According to her, a loan to IDG which the lender says is “written off” has actually been “converted to equity.”
IDG has been arguing that: “The current business model of an outside company coming in, tapping our resources and then making us pay for the product we give them access to exploit is not the future we envision.” But Brandt’s admission/claim that New Zealand-based Geothermal developer Eastland is now an equity owner puts the lie to IDG’s positioning itself as an alternative to “an outside company coming in.” IDG is now a front for its co-owner, Eastland.
Perhaps realizing that, Brandt hastens to add: “the Eastland stake represents a small fraction of what the IDG team has invested….” Really? Since this is a publicly funded company, they should open their books so the public can know what OHA bought with its beneficiaries’ money.
While Brandt was busy trying to clean up after we discovered Eastland’s IDG loan “write-off”, OHA Trustee Rowena Akana produced a sad little effort in her September, 2013 Ka Wai Ola column. Titled: “Divide and Conquer is the mission of the ‘Grassroot’ Folk,” Akana does not attempt to refute any claim from our article. She instead tells readers:
“After reading Andrew Walden’s article in his Hawaii Free Press (HFP) blog, accusing OHA of investing in a geothermal ‘scheme,’ I feel it is very important to point out that Walden can easily be grouped with the following anti-Hawaiian of conservative groups that do everything they can to divide the Hawaiian Community….”
Stuck with no argument to defend her geothermal scheme, Akana apparently can’t find anything in this writer's character to attack—so she just fills in with proxies. The rest of her column is a list of people selected to imply—falsely--that Hawai’i Free Press has something to do with what Akana calls “frivolous lawsuits” against “programs that benefit Native Hawaiians preferentially.”
It’s not clear what “can easily be grouped” means. For instance Hawai’i Free Press “can easily be grouped” with -- Rowena Akana. We have published her columns on several occasions. Akana’s August, 2012 and June, 2013 critiques of OHA’s Pacific Gentry purchase were both censored by Ka Wai Ola and then printed in Hawai’i Free Press. Simple deduction or measurement of “degrees of separation” tells us that anybody to whom this writer “can easily be grouped” can also “easily be grouped” with Akana and therefore IDG.
Ka Wai Ola, April 2013 blames the poor response to the latest version of the Akaka tribal roll on “the lack of imminent threats to Native Hawaiian programs, such as lawsuits, which creates a lesser sense of urgency.” If Trustees can pull out the lawsuit bogeyman, they can scare Hawaiians into signing up for a fake Indian tribe -- or paying more on their electric bill. So Akana’s accusations are schizophrenic: She accuses us of being divisive while at the same time attempting to tie us to forces to which OHA attributes the same unifying effect that drives lemmings.
Geothermal is a firm energy source which has a substantially lower cost of production than wind, solar, or oil. That’s why it is an irresistible target for rent-seeking criminals intending to position themselves as energy middlemen profiting on the sandwich profits to be had in the huge gap between the low cost of production and Hawaii’s highest-in-the nation retail electric rates.
The anti-geothermal protesters in Puna are led by two convicted drug dealers: Ralph Palikapu Dedman and Robert Petricci.
Wannabe geothermal developer IDG was founded by convicted fraudster Roberta Cabral. Here are the details of her plea bargain as explained by the US Department of Justice, June 17, 2002:
According to the plea agreement filed with the court, CABRAL willfully failed to file a federal or State of Hawaii income tax return for the tax year 1994 during which year she received gross income in excess of $50,000 in commissions from North Pacific Investments, Inc. for her participation in a $10 million dollar offshore investment scheme entered into by Unity House, Inc. Furthermore, CABRAL admitted in her plea agreement that the money she received for her participation in that scheme were wire transferred to her through a British Virgin Islands corporation controlled by CABRAL and used by her for the concealment of income.
CABRAL further admitted in the plea agreement that she created HONUA Group, LLC, through an unindicted nominee and opened a bank account on November 14, 1997, using her brother's social security number, in order to hide income she received, and in a willful attempt to evade over $118,657.00 in taxes she owed for the calendar years 1992 and 1993. CABRAL also admitted in the plea agreement to participating in a scheme to defraud Unity House, Inc. with her now deceased co-defendant Roderick Rodriquez. As also outlined in her plea agreement, CABRAL devised with Rodriquez a scheme to "pad" the budget of a one-hour television project funded by Unity House, Inc. entitled "Heavenly Road", later known as "Blue Hawaii", for which she was to receive a kickback of $150,000.
Cabral tried to “divide” Unity House assets from Unity House beneficiaries. Now she has “divided” OHA assets from OHA beneficiaries. In the very unlikely event that her scheme ever produces a geothermal plant, she will “divide” ratepayers from their money by charging outrageous wholesale electric rates which will then be passed onto the consumer.
That’s the real “divide and conquer.”
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Full Text: After Receiving Campaign Cash, OHA Trustees Give $1.25M to Insolvent Geothermal Company