Donald L. Blankenship cuts against the usual grain of a modern CEO. He’s a tough guy who is not afraid to speak his mind, beat back environmental critics, hamstring unions or put his money where his mouth is when it comes to political spending. He is the kind of executive liberal elites love to hate.
His Richmond, Va.-based firm, Massey Energy Company, is the No. 4 coal producer in the U.S. With oil prices shooting sky high and coal prices following, Massey is on a roll. Extreme global demand for steam and metallurgical coal from West Virginia, Kentucky and Virginia has pushed prices towards $100 per ton. Massey’s stock has rocketed from the high teens last summer to near $60 a share today.
Yet Massey has become Peck’s Bad Boy for Big Coal. Blankenship, who has been boss for about eight years, has seen his firm sued or fined for coal mine fatalities, sludge pond washouts and other ecological issues. It is a major player in so-called “mountaintop removal” — a kind of strip-mining on steroids in which entire mountains are chopped away to reach coal seams.
Blankenship doesn’t blink when it comes to his zest for coal extraction. In 2004, he spent $3.5 million to back a controversial nominee for the West Virginia Supreme Court and has vowed to remove another judge who ruled against some of Massey’s mountaintop removal plans. More recently, Blankenship was photographed vacationing in Monaco with West Virginia Supreme Court Justice Elliott “Spike” Maynard.
At Massey’s annual meeting today in Richmond today, shareholders represented by the AFL-CIO pushed a resolution calling for Massey to file semiannual reports on how decisions are made to make political contributions and who makes them. Another resolution called for Massey to report on how it intends to deal with rising pressure to cut back on greenhouse gas emissions. Both measures were quickly defeated.
I tried to attend the meeting at Richmond’s four-star Jefferson Hotel, but was told there were no accommodations for the media. A webcast would be available if I wanted to go back to my home or office and watch it. Investor relations specialist Roger Henrickson told me that if Massey let “unfavorable” media in, there could be disruption, as indeed there have been at previous annual meetings.
Looking around the hotel corridors with their blue-suited policemen and strapping young men in suits with wires coming out of their ears, I decided to retreat. An interview request with Blankenship was declined. To be fair, I have interviewed him before and a few years ago Massey graciously let a photographer and me into one of their deep mines.
The company directors are anything but unaccomplished. One is Bobby Ray Inman, a former admiral who headed the super-secret National Security Agency and was Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Another is Lady Judge, chair of the UK Atomic Energy Authority and a former a SEC commissioner.
But is this any way to handle the public? I’ve covered plenty of annual meetings in my day. Consumer goods giant Procter & Gamble, for instance, went to great lengths to accommodate media and other outsiders even though they had their own issues, such as using animals in testing.
I realize that Massey’s strong arm approach is extreme, but what should CEOs do? What’s your view?
