"They couldn't have been that dumb."
Florida Power & Light CEO Eric Silagy said when he first heard about the lucrative JEA employee incentive plan that ended up derailing the attempted sale of JEA in 2019, his initial reaction was sheer disbelief that "they couldn't have been that dumb."
Silagy said he thought a Florida Times-Union article about the incentive plan must have been based on erroneous reporting.
"I didn’t believe it," he said in a recent interview with several Florida reporters. "I thought you got it wrong. I honestly did."
NextEra Energy, the parent company of FPL, had been at the top of the bidding battle for JEA when it submitted an $11 billion offer in 2019, eclipsing any other bid by more than $1 billion.
But one month after the news broke about a City Council Auditor's report that said JEA employees could pocket several hundred million dollars from a sale of the utility, the JEA board canceled all bids that December.
Read more at the Florida Times-Union