"Despite promises to steer clear of his former employer, the disgraced banker who spearheaded EPA's toxic waste cleanup reform efforts communicated extensively while at the agency with the institution he once led, newly released emails show.
The communications, ethics experts say, should lead to further investigations of Albert "Kell" Kelly, the former chairman of the Tulsa, Okla.-based SpiritBank who joined EPA as a Superfund adviser two years ago after he'd been banned from the banking industry on May 9, 2017 (Greenwire, May 23, 2017).
Issued by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., the ban immediately and permanently prohibited Kelly from "participating in any matter in the conduct or the affairs of any financial institution."
Yet while he was overseeing the Superfund program at EPA, the adviser and onetime lender to former EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt continued to correspond with officials at SpiritBank — including his successor as chairman and another top executive."
