Keystone Kops Part #3 - TransCanada listed as AUTHOR of ERM's Conflict of Interest statement

[wtmusic]

Last edited Mon Mar 18, 2013, 12:42 PM - Edit history (1)

Followup on earlier posts:

Keystone analyst's claims of impartiality conflict with unredacted documents
Someone at the State Dept. has scrubbed the Keystone conflicts I found from their documents

What you're looking at - a document, supposedly provided by Environmental Resources Management to the State Dept. pledging they have no business with TransCanada, was created by TransCanada. Though the bios were scrubbed, someone was stupid enough to leave TransCanada listed as the author of the document.

onedit: we'll see if they clean up this mess, too.





Link to document at State Dept.

[limpyhobbler]

1. Wait what...

omg.

This seems like it should be a big story.

[wtmusic]

2. Sure seems that way to me.

Last edited Mon Mar 18, 2013, 06:17 PM - Edit history (1)

There is no reason why TransCanada's name would be listed as author, unless the document were originated on their computer. Microsoft Word requires online key validation with the name of the owner, which it then inserts into the header of documents it creates.

If I had to guess, the conversation went something like this:

TRANSCANADA: Are you going to redact those jobs we did?
ERM: Which ones? Tell you what, we'll send you over the COI and just redact whatever you don't want State to see.

Transcanada then redacted their employee bios, created a PDF, and returned the document to ERM for submission.

The wording is interesting: "Contract PDF with Redactions." Contracts invariably indicate a business relationship. Was the relationship involving the redaction or a kickback of some sort? All kinds of possibilities.

[Joe Shlabotnik]

5. +1

should be.

[limpyhobbler]

3. So is this where you find the documents?

http://keystonepipeline-xl.state.gov/draftseis/index.htm

[wtmusic]

4. This is the specific page for ERM:

http://keystonepipeline-xl.state.gov/admindocs/index.htm:

It's under Update on the project home page:

http://www.keystonepipeline-xl.state.gov/