FOCUS-Results tally up billions in profit from Texas freeze for gas and power sellers
Devika Krishna Kumar, Scott DiSavino and Jessica Resnick-Ault, 06 May 2021
Natural gas suppliers, pipeline companies and banks that trade commodities have emerged as the biggest market winners from February’s U.S. winter blast that roiled gas and power markets, according to more than two dozen interviews and quarterly earnings reports.
The deep freeze caught Texas’s utilities off-guard, killed more than 100 people and left 4.5 million without power. Demand for heat pushed wholesale power costs to 400 times the usual amount and propelled natural gas prices to record highs, forcing utilities and consumers to pay exorbitant bills. Continue reading “Article: FOCUS-Results tally up billions in profit from Texas freeze for gas and power sellers”
AUSTIN (KXAN) — Not all ATMs are created equal.
Five people have been charged in federal court for their alleged involvement in two securities fraud schemes. According to prosecutors, the schemes involved an offering fraud of a Texas-based oil and gas company and the attempted manipulation of a cannabis company’s publicly traded stock.
Vanita Gupta was fresh out of law school when she heard about what happened in Tulia, Texas. Two years earlier, in 1999, nearly half of the town’s adult Black population was rounded up in a drug sting on the word of a single undercover cop, accused of selling him small amounts of cocaine. Several convictions swiftly followed, accompanied by sentences of up to 361 years. The remaining defendants, 43 of whom were people of color, started pleading guilty.
Patent holder VLSI made its final argument Tuesday that Intel owes $3 billion for allegedly infringing chip-voltage-regulation technology, telling a Texas federal jury Intel’s witnesses contradicted themselves at moments they weren’t “getting the script right.”
EL PASO, Texas (KTSM) — It might look like the women from Bravo’s “Real Housewives” franchises have it all, but a recent arrest of one star is shedding light on criminal schemes across the country. 
It was a bleak moment for the oil industry. U.S. shale companies were failing by the dozen. Petrostates were on the brink of bankruptcy. Texas roughnecks and Kuwaiti princes alike had watched helplessly for months as the commodity that was their lifeblood tumbled to prices that had until recently seemed unthinkable. Below $50 a barrel, then below $40, then below $30.
A former governor of Tamaulipas, Mexico on Thursday pleaded guilty in a Texas court for taking over $3.5 million in bribes for government contracts, which he then laundered in the United States.