“(T)he Mayor only cared about getting JEA sold and didn't care that his self appointed team at JEA and his political consultants were all going to make outlandish sums at the expense of the citizens,” a lawyer at one of JEA’s firms, Foley & Lardner, wrote.
jacksonville.com/story/news/col…
The conversations among attorneys at Foley & Lardner, a large and politically connected law firm with offices in Florida and across the country, were part of a recent batch of records JEA provided in response to a records request from the Times-Union.
They provide remarkable insight into the origins of the controversial bonus plan, the concerns of some of the key people who crafted it and the lengths to which they worked to implement it despite numerous roadblocks in Florida law designed to prevent such payouts.
The emails cast serious doubt on claims made since by ousted CEO Aaron Zahn that every decision he made was carefully vetted and signed off on by outside attorneys.
"I advised them months ago that the (bonus plan) was a bad idea and would kill the whole deal," one of the attorneys told his colleagues in a Nov. 23 email.
By November, attorneys at Foley came to understand the bonus plan that had put JEA executives on the defensive could have approached $1 billion in payouts.
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