United Coal Company (UCC) is a nonunion coal mining company headquartered in Teays Valley, West Virginia. It is a leading producer of high grade metallurgical coals, with underground, surface, and highwall operations in Virginia, West Virginia, and Kentucky, and is a subsidiary of the United Management Company, headquartered at Bristol, Virginia. The UCC produces high, medium, and low volatile coking coals, serving coking coal customers both domestically and worldwide. By 2007 UCC was producing at a rate of 7.5 million tons of coal a year – 80 percent metallurgical and 20 percent steam.
In May 2009 Ukrainian business group SCM Holdings/Metinvest acquired the company for an estimated $1 to $1.4 billion (USD). Metinvest is an international, vertically integrated mining and steel group of companies, comprising 23 industrial companies leading the mining and steel industry of Ukraine and the Commonwealth of Independent States. Metinvest is owned by Rinat Akhmetov, a coal baron who is ranked by Forbes as having a personal fortune of $5.2 billion made from his steel and coal interests.
Metinvest reportedly purchased the privately held United Coal Company for access to UCC metallurgical coal reserves in Appalachia that will be mined and exported for the production of high grade steel in Europe.
2.1 The 2006 "McGlothlin Energy Policy"
United in 2006 allowed former King Pharmaceuticals executives John M. Gregory and Joseph "Joe" Gregory of Bristol, Tennessee and of SJ Investments, and Gregory Energy Partners, to invest in the company. The Gregory brothers are its first investors outside the McGlothlin family.
In 1970, Jim McGlothin (a legal resident of Austin, Texas), along with his father Woodrow W. McGlothlin (who started the Diamond Smokeless Coal Co. in the mid-1950s) and five other investors, founded the United Coal Company in Grundy, Virginia. McGlothlin first sold UCC in 1997 and later repurchased the company in 2004. The McGlothlins also founded The McGlothlin Foundation, which funds a variety of education-related causes in Southwest Virginia.
The 2006 "McGlothlin Energy Policy"
While speaking at the industry-sponsored 2006 Virginia Coal Conference held at the Meadowview Convention Center in Kingsport, Tennessee, McGlothlin described the United States energy policy as being "America's Achilles heel" and compromising national economic independence due to both losing manufacturing jobs to relaxed labor, environmental, and saftety costs in China and to America being energy dependent upon Islamic nations "with the most extreme and hostile people on earth."
placing tariffs on stocks of imported crude oil arriving in the United States.
UCC's parent company United Management Company, LLC is invested in oil, gas, power generation, industrial parts distribution, and finance, and maintains the publicly traded UC Investment Fund (UCIFX).
In August 2009, United Coal Company moved into its new corporate headquarters at 110 Sprint Drive in Blountville, Tennessee, approximately one mile from the Blountville residence of Tennessee Lt. Governor Ron Ramsey.
Headquartered in Blountville, Tennessee , the United Coal Company operates six subsidiaries in three states. A staff of 34 employees work out of the Blountville office, which combines all corporate activities and executives in one location, including legal counsel, risk management, accounting, purchasing, information technology, human resources and sales – departments previously located in Teays Valley, West Virginia, and Bristol, Virginia.
United Coal and other coal companies invited former Florida Governor and likely presidential candidate Jeb Bush to be the keynote speaker at the 2015 Coal and Investment Leadership Forum, an invitation-only retreat that brings together coal industry executives, Republican donors, and other "stakeholders," according to an invitation obtained by the Center for Media and Democracy and reported on by The Guardian. Bush "evidently signalled his willingness to meet with industry leaders as early as February when the hosts of the coal forum – all owners and executives of coalmining companies – emailed out the first save-the-date notices," The Guardian reported.
Others named in the 2015 invitation included Tennessee Valley Authority president Bill Johns, Christopher C. Horner of the Competitive Enterprise Institute and Energy & Environment Legal Institute, and "the owners and chief executives of coalmining and energy companies" including Alliance Resource Partners, Alpha Natural Resources, Consol Energy, Drummond Company, and Arch Coal.
↑ "The World's Billionaires: #148 Rinat Akhmetov", Forbes, October 2010.
↑ http://www.themountaineagle.com/news/2009-05-06/front_page/001.html Wealthiest man in Europe buys United Coal Co. May 6, 2009. The Mountain Eagle.
↑ http://www.tnsenate.com/members-1/lt-gov-ron-ramsey 'Lt. Gov. Ron Ramsey. Tennessee Senate Republican Caucus.
↑ http://ucc.metinvestholding.com/en/activity/facilities Metinvest - OUR FACILITIES.
↑ 11.0 11.1 11.2 11.3 11.4 11.5 Suzanne Goldenberg, "Jeb Bush cozies up to coal industry barons at closed-door meeting," The Guardian, May 29, 2015.
Wikipedia also has an article on United Coal Company. This article may use content from the Wikipedia article under the terms of the GFDL.
This page was last edited on 29 May 2015, at 15:47.