REUTERS EXCERPT/EDITED BY POSTER: In 2003, Harry Reid made a show of publicly banning relatives from lobbying him or his staff after newspaper reports showed that Nevada industries and institutions routinely turned to Reid's sons or son-in-law, lawyers at prominent area law firms, for representation.
Now, Harry Reid and his oldest son, Rory, are both involved in Chinese Energy giant's ENN Energy Group, to build a $5 billion solar farm and solar panel manufacturing plant in the southern Nevada desert.
Reid himself helped recruit the solar company during a 2011 Senate junket to China.ENN is headed by Chinese energy tycoon Wang Yusuo, who made a fortune estimated by Forbes at $2.2 billion distributing natural gas in China.
Wang escorted Harry Reid and a delegation of nine other U.S. senators on a tour of the company's clean energy operations in Langfang, and Reid featured Wang as a speaker at his 4th annual National Clean Energy Summit in Las Vegas last year.
Rory, a lawyer with a prominent politically-connected Las Vegas firm that is representing ENN, helped it locate a 9,000-acre (3,600-hectare) desert site that it is buying well below appraised value from Clark County, where Rory Reid formerly chaired the county commission.
The Langfang, China-based ENN Energy Group hopes to build what would be the largest solar energy complex in America. The site----chosen with Rory Reid's guidance----is in tiny Laughlin, Nevada, a gambling town of 7,300 along the Colorado River, 90 miles south of Las Vegas.
twisted bassturds
To advance the Nevada solar project, the behemoth Chinese energy company, ENN, retained Nevada's largest and most prestigious law firm--Lionel Sawyer & Collins--where Rory Reid works. The law firm is headed by Richard Bryan, a former Nevada attorney general, governor, and member of the U.S. Senate.
Harry's eldest son, Rory Reid, faced a one-year cooling off period from lobbying the Clark County commission after leaving his post there in January 2011, so law frim principle, and ex-Sen, Bryan took the lead on ENN's negotiations with the county. Since the one-year ban expired, Rory Reid has been ENN's primary representative before the county, according to Steve Sisolak, the board's vice chairman.
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Two months after Harry Reid's China junket subsidized by taxpayers, Lionel Sawyer registered ENN Mohave Energy LLC as an American subsidiary of the Chinese company. The firm negotiated with the county to buy the land rather than lease it, as the county's staff had recommended.
In December, Clark County commissioners voted unanimously to sell up to 9,000 acres of public land to the subsidiary at pennies on the dollar.The deal spurred local controversy. Separate appraisals valued the land at $29.6 million and $38.6 million. The commission agreed to sell it to ENN for $4.5 million.
The county did build in certain conditions before the project could begin, including milestones for jobs creation and investment. ENN also must assure the county that it has a power company willing to commit to buying energy from the solar farm. But in the eight months since the commissioners approved the deal, no utility had signed a power purchase agreement.
However, Harry Reid stepped in to flex his political muscle. Reid used an online discussion related to his annual energy summit for an as-yet unsuccessful effort to pressure Nevada's largest power company, NV Energy, to sign up as ENN's first customer.
In the July 30 online discussion, Reid said the project "would start tomorrow if NV Energy would purchase the power." The utility controls "95 percent of all of the electricity that is produced in Nevada and they should go along with this." Reid's online comments were first reported by the Las Vegas Review Journal.
The power company responded by saying it had exceeded its minimum renewable energy requirements both last year and this year, though it would consider buying power from ENN in the future. A spokesman for NV Energy declined to discuss the matter further.
Ex-Sen Bryan, the head of Rory Reid's law firm, did not return Reuters repeated phone calls and emails. An official with ENN in Langfang, China, did not respond to Reuters emails.
Rory Reid acknowledged representing ENN at both the county and state levels. He declined to discuss the project with Reuters.
And the Wisk profile on ReidBunkerville LLC says it was conveeeeeniently started up in 2010.
In the REAL world, it would be called insider trading, but in the liberal bubble, it's just business-as-usual.