West Virginia's environmental regulator sued Alpha Natural Resources Inc.’s former management on allegations of fraud on Wednesday, saying that top executives should be held accountable for an unusual $100 million funding gap that has emerged just three months after the U.S. coal producer exited bankruptcy, Reuters reported yesterday. The lawsuit accused six senior executives including CEO Kevin Crutchfield of making misleading financial projections about Alpha so that its bankruptcy plan would get court approval. After the plan was approved in July, the executives joined the management team of Contura Energy Inc, which bought some of Alpha's most productive mines. "In knowingly making or allowing to be made, false and misleading projections to obtain confirmation of (Alpha's) chapter 11 plan, each of the named individual defendants committed a fraud upon this court," the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) said in the lawsuit.
