A landowner from Montrose says he has recorded proof that a land agent for the proposed Bakken Pipeline offered to get him an 18-year-old prostitute if he’d grant access rights to his property so the pipeline may pass through. The company has not yet responded to the allegations. Hughie Tweedy of Montrose says he recorded two of his conversations with the land agent.
“On these recordings you will hear evidence of my senior pipeline representative offering me not once, not twice, but three times the sexual services of a woman,” Tweedy said, “the last time being a $1200 teenage prostitute.”
Tweedy held a news conference on the steps of the statehouse Monday to make the allegations. Tweedy told reporters he had planned to hand copies of the recordings to reporters, but his lawyer advised against it, since Tweedy may file a lawsuit against the company. But Tweedy says he’d turn the recordings over to the state’s attorney general if the Iowa Department of Justice plans to launch a criminal investigation of the company.
“If an old junkyard dog like me was offered the sexual services of little girls to get my hackles down, I wonder what was offered to the powerbrokers of this state to gain their support for silence,” Tweedy says. “Shame, shame, shame.”
Tweedy says he decided to go public with his allegations to spur legislators to pass a bill that would make it more difficult for the pipeline to seize property for the project. The bill is eligible for debate in the Iowa Senate. It would require the pipeline’s developers to pick up the legal tab for landowners who can’t afford to hire a lawyer to go over land lease contracts.
This month the pipeline company twice asked deputy sheriffs to accompany land surveyors to Tweedy’s property in Lee County and Tweedy says they told him it was because they’d heard his property had been “booby-trapped.” Tweedy calls it “intimidation”.
Messages left for a spokesperson for Energy Transfer Partners were not returned Monday.
