former Congressman Joseph Kennedy II’s “not-for-profit energy company”
Citizens Energy Corporation is not the organization that is directly involved with the program. Rather, one has to first look to a holding company, which is a for-profit and wholly owned subsidiary of Citizens Energy’s called Citizens Enterprises Corporation: first, eighty-six percent of Mr. Kennedy’s over $400,000 annual salary comes from this organization. Second, among the nine companies that it manages is Citizens Program Corporation, which directly handles the Citgo heating oil program. This company went from having almost no assets in 2004 to recording the purchase and later sale of over two million dollars worth of oil in 2005. Then in the first half of 2006 they managed to buy over ten million dollars in oil which they sold for over sixteen million dollars.
However there’s a problem with the math in these deals. According to Citgo 40 million gallons of oil went to help 181,000 households last year, however Citizens Energy claims it was 170,000 households. Now if you take the average cost of home heating oil (which was $2.43 per gallon), and the amount of $6,463,078 that Citizens Programs Corporation claimed to have spent on this program, the greatest number of gallons they could have been provided was 2,657,702. This is significantly less than the forty million gallons Citgo claims to have provided. If this amount was supplied to the 170,000 families that Kennedy claims to have helped, it would mean that each of those homes would have received only 15.6 gallons (or 14.6 gallons if Citgo is to be believed).
Interestingly, the numbers provided by Citgo offer a breakdown by State on the number households aided and total gallons involved. The disparities by State offer a view into what this program really seeks to accomplish. In New York where the program was limited to Bronx and Harlem are the districts represented by Congressmen Charles Rangel and Jose Serrano, the latter being arguably Chavez’s biggest ally in the US Congress, the average household received 454 gallons of oil from Citgo. In Massachusetts — the Kennedy stronghold – was where Representative Bill Delahunt, who is Chairman of the Subcommittee on International Organizations, Human Rights, and Oversight of the House Foreign Relations Committee welcomed the delivery of on average 240 gallons of oil per household. That’s also the most oil delivered to a single state.