Lawsuits: National Natural Gas Company Behind Effort That Bilked 92-Year Old Widow & Many Other Northern Michigan Landowners On Drilling Leases

In Emmet County, Michigan, Interlochen Public Radio reports:

• Last May, oil and gas companies spent of hundreds-of-millions of dollars buying up rights to drill in Michigan. By summer, private landowners in northern Michigan had signed leases promising record payments to drill for their minerals.
• But by the end of the year, the frenzy over the new gas play had fizzled, and hundreds of people were claiming they'd been cheated. Lawsuits now say gas developers didn't just break their word, but they allegedly engaged in fraud and conspiracy to manipulate the market.

  Feeling Bilked

• The first person to file suit against the gas companies in Emmet County is Mildred Lutz. A sturdy 92 years old, she still keeps a garden and cans her own vegetables. Last summer, a man knocked on her door and offered to pay her almost $100,000 dollars for the oil and gas deep underground beneath her farm.
• Mildred had just lost her husband of 69 years, Carl, and she thought the money would come in handy for a whole list of expenses, including funeral costs. [...] After talking it over with her five children, she signed a lease with the man from Western Land Services of Ludington squeezed around her kitchen table with a son and a grandson. Then they took the document to the bank in Alanson to be notarized.
• She never heard another word from the oil and gas developers and she never got paid.

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• Last summer, land men for a number of oil and gas companies were swarming over northern Michigan signing these leases. It appeared Michigan could be on the verge of a new natural gas boom to rival those in Louisiana and Pennsylvania. But by fall the activity seemed to drop off a cliff and Attorney Bill Rolinski says he heard from a lot of people who ended up in the same boat as Mildred Lutz.
• Many of them showed up at town hall meetings held late last year. "We'd have 200-to-400 people in attendance," he says. "And then I began to understand the scope of how the market was manipulated."
• Rolinski has named six companies in lawsuits. But what he discovered is that they all were working on behalf of Chesapeake Energy, the second largest natural gas company in the country.

For more, see Area Landowners Claim Fraud In Oil & Gas Contracts (Mildred Lutz, 92, is suing over an oil-and-gas lease that brought her nothing).

See also, WPBN-WTOM-TV Channels 7&4: Energy company says they have done no wrong voiding oil and gas leases (Chesapeake Energy says lawsuits are without legal merit).

See NY AG Warns Consumers On Entering Natural Gas Exploration Leases for similar complaints regarding oil & gas drilling outfits operating in other parts of the country.