No organization is doing a better job keeping corporate predation in the news than is ProPublica in its collaboration with local newspapers on the ground. It has come up with another outstanding bit of gumshoeing on that beat with its latest story from West Virginia. Residents of that state were promised royalty checks from various extraction industries if they allowed those entities to drill on their land. Do you know what's coming? Of course, you do.

EQT began deducting for what it said was the cost of transporting the gas, for processing the gas and even for state taxes. All told, since November 2016, the Richardses calculated they were missing about $235,000 in royalties.



The Richardses had looked closely at their lease agreements. The agreements stated that EQT would give them 12.5 percent of the revenue generated from the wells. They didn’t say anything about allowing deductions. So the Richardses went to court, filing a federal suit against the company in February 2017.



“I only want the royalty that is due us, according to our lease,” Mary Richards told a jury in Clarksburg this September.



Arnold and Mary Richards are the latest among thousands of West Virginians who have watched the state’s natural gas producers whittle away at royalties promised to them, according to a review of court records by the Charleston Gazette-Mail and ProPublica.

We elected a third-rate chiseler to be president*, so it should be no surprise that, within the corporate ethos in which he'd swum for decades, third-rate chiseling would be the order of the day. It is certainly a sight to behold when a multimillion corporation behaves like a guy who knocks on your door to sell you aluminum siding made out of plywood.

An abandoned home in West Virginia. Spencer Platt Getty Images

While the state Legislature and courts have both tried to ensure that residents are getting their fair share, gas companies have simply shifted their tactics.



In 1982, the Legislature banned leases that limited payments to just a few hundred dollars a year. The bill declared an end to the “continued exploitation of the natural resources of this state in exchange for such wholly inadequate compensation.”



Twenty years later, residents filed a series of suits alleging they were still being shortchanged. The lawsuits prompted a series of settlements and a $400 million verdict in 2007.



Yet residents say these practices haven’t ended. A class-action lawsuit, filed in 2013 on behalf of more than 10,000 individuals and companies that own gas, is set to go to trial in two weeks. It alleges that EQT—the state’s second-largest producer—continues to take improper deductions from royalties.

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It is here where we point out (again) that unless these companies are fined so heavily that they can barely survive, or until brigades of corporate officers are introduced to federal institutional dining, none of this ever changes. This company got hit with a $400 million verdict 11 years ago, and it's back doing the same damn thing.

West Virginia’s natural gas industry has flourished, with production roughly tripling in the past five years. State leaders portray the industry as the heart of a strong future economy, perhaps to replace the declining coal business.



But there are growing indications that natural gas is taking West Virginia down the same path as coal, including a long and continuing battle over how the profits are divvied up among residents and out-of-state companies that are extracting natural resources from the land. And EQT is now suing to gut the 1982 royalty law that was meant to give gas owners a larger piece of the industry pie.

I'm shocked.

For Arnold Richards, the reason to fight is clear: “It’s not because I don’t have enough money to live on. I do,” he testified. “I really worked hard all these years to get it, not pass it on to a corporation.”



After deliberating for just a few hours, the jury ordered EQT to repay the Richardses the $192,000 in post-production costs that had been deducted from their royalty payments. U.S. District Judge Irene Keeley had already ordered the company to pay them nearly $43,000 in taxes that had been deducted, for a total of $235,000.

So there's a little justice, anyway. And I think, "I really worked hard all these years to get it, not pass it on to a corporation,” isn't a bad tax policy, either.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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