A Faked Kidnapping and Cocaine: A Montana Mine’s Descent Into Chaos

In recent months, Mr. Thiele has been consumed by a new pastime: digging into the multinational corporations that lurk behind Signal Peak, an attempt to understand the corporate forces that ranchers like him are up against.

“It’s important for us to know who we’re dealing with,” he said during a recent interview at his home, about a 10-minute drive from the mine.

In painstakingly compiled handwritten notes and diagrams, Mr. Thiele laid out the corporate structure: Signal Peak is technically owned by two shell companies, paper-only businesses with minimal disclosure rules, that obscure the fact that they are controlled by a trio of out-of-state corporations. What’s more, he was stunned to learn, those corporations are embroiled in their own scandals.

One is FirstEnergy, the Ohio-based utility that invested $400 million to open the underground mine in 2009 with the investment firm Boich Group. In 2021, the company admitted to funneling tens of millions of dollars in bribes to state legislators and regulators to advance a $1 billion bailout for aging nuclear and coal-fired power plants. The Justice Department fined FirstEnergy a record $230 million in a sprawling bribery case, the largest ever in Ohio. A spokeswoman for FirstEnergy said that while FirstEnergy has a stake in the company that operates the mine, it does not run the site.

Mr. Boich has also been implicated in the case. According to local news reports and a federal criminal complaint, he made substantial donations to the dark money organization at the center of the scandal. He has not been charged with any crime. A spokesman for Mr. Boich said the billionaire’s political contributions had taken place in strict accordance with the law.

The third owner is the Gunvor Group, a multinational trading company formerly owned by Gennady N. Timchenko, a Russian billionaire and confidante of Mr. Putin. Signal Peak is the only coal mine owned by Gunvor, which specializes in trading commodities like oil, gas, coal and minerals, not producing them.

For years, the United States Treasury maintained that Mr. Putin held investments in Gunvor and may have had access to Gunvor funds. After Russia invaded Crimea in 2014, the State Department placed sanctions on Mr. Timchenko and he announced that he had sold his interest in the company.