Anheuser family heirs hit with $56M verdict over Kirkwood energy company

Two descendants of a co-founder of Anheuser-Busch and their family trusts were part of a group ordered on Friday to pay tens of millions of dollars to a company whose investors they allegedly swindled. 

Attorney Jeremiah Nixon represented hundreds of people who had invested in an alternative energy company but wound up on the short end of what Nixon characterized as an insider deal. The son of the former Missouri governor, Nixon laid out a sordid scheme in his closing arguments in St. Louis County Circuit Court on Friday, arguing to the jury that Dennis Moore, along with Innerpoint Energy CEO Glenn Foy, feigned insolvency to more than 400 shareholders, even after their company struck a windfall in Michigan. 

Nixon described InnerPoint as “a company built by many, stolen by few.” The jury ultimately agreed, hitting Moore, the Moore Family Trusts, and Foy with a verdict just a hair under $56 million. 

Moore was a member of InnerPoint’s board of directors, and the Moore Family Trusts were the company’s controlling shareholder. Both Dennis Moore and his brother Donald were trustees for trusts in the name of their grandmother, Alice Anheuser Beims Moore. 

Alice, who died in 1989, was the great granddaughter of Eberhard Anheuser, a German immigrant who in 1860 purchased the brewery that would go on to become Anheuser-Busch.

“The Anheuser name has died out by virtue of no male offspring carrying the name on,” says Mathew Placzek, one of the attorneys for the people suing the Moores. “That is the direct Anheuser line.”

The value of the trusts became a salient issue during the final phase of the trial. Attorneys for the investors said that they were valued in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

In a statement through their attorney, Dennis Moore and Don Moore said that they “continue to deny that they engaged in any wrongdoing with respect to Innerpoint Energy Corporation” and “will be vigorously pursuing an appeal of the verdict.” 

At trial, their attorney Kevin Sullivan went to great lengths to convey the amount of money that the Moore trusts and Dennis Moore invested in a company that for years gave no return. He talked about Foy’s own dedication as well, with the CEO often sleeping at the office when in town to save money on hotel fare. 

Despite the descendents of one the city’s most famous businessmen facing off against the son of a former governor, the suit played out in relative secrecy. It was given a heightened security status on Casenet, the Missouri courts’ public interface, making its filings and information about its trial setting largely inaccessible to court watchers. 

The saga of InnerPoint began in 2001 with the founding of Innovative Energy, a company headquartered in Kirkwood that hoped to develop technology that could turn waste in municipal landfills into energy. Its founder, Andrew Schlote, had hoped to develop technology that would convert organic waste into synthetic gas that could power a turbine, which would generate power. He’d eventually develop more than 30 patents in his quest. 

His company quickly hit a cash crunch, failing to pay payroll taxes and getting hit with IRS penalties. There were layoffs and defaulted loans. In 2012, the company had $600,000 in assets and millions in debt. In 2013, Innovative was sold to InnerPoint. At some point, Schlote shifted his role from leadership to focus more on developing technology. He would ultimately wind up suing Dennis Moore and the family trust alongside other investors.

Moore and the trust invested millions in the Innerpoint clean energy concern, and they were not alone. The 400 people represented by Nixon in the trial invested $43 million. Word of the investment opportunity spread largely by word of mouth and through interpersonal networks. Among the 400 was a contingent of St. Louisans in the medical device field. Another group of shareholders were physicians in Springfield. One doctor who gave testimony at trial was in his seventies and said that he’d hoped to be retired by now, but couldn’t because of the money he lost on InnerPoint. 

Despite those investors’ hopes in the technology, Innerpoint continued to have bad luck. Machines exploded. Facilities flooded. In May 2016, a plant in Cedar Hill meant to be a proof of concept for the company caught fire at the exact time that representatives from Christy Minerals were touring the facility and viewing its technology to potentially do business with them. The mineral company passed. InnerPoint continued to bleed cash. 

But the tide began to turn. InnerPoint created a new subsidiary, Michigan Hub LLC, and—with money from the Moore family trusts, funneled through yet another new company called MO-MI LLC—that subsidiary bought a decommissioned coal plant in Litchfield, Michigan in 2017. The plan, originally, had been to break the plant down and sell it for parts.

But then, at the end of 2016, a new Michigan law required power companies in the state to have a certain percentage of their power generated within Michigan. “It’s basic supply and demand, it made [power generated in] Michigan more appealing for power companies,” says Nixon. 

Suddenly the value of the plant skyrocketed. A buyer offered to purchase it for $47 million, and then raised the offer to $53 million. At the time, Innerpoint’s CEO was Glenn Foy, who lived in Montana and had been involved in a number of different startups.

InnerPoint’s shareholders knew of the Litchfield plant, but not its new economic potential. 

“At that point, it really became Glenn Foy and the Moores and they, in complete violation of their fiduciary duties, held the valuable information close to their chest and painted a picture of the company in dire straits to everyone else,” says Nixon.

At last week’s trial, Nixon recounted how Foy flew to St. Louis to conduct a “secret meeting” with the Moores and their attorney. Nixon described the Litchfield plant as “a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity” for the shareholders. But for Foy, the Moores, and their attorney, “greed took over,” Nixon alleged. He added that they “orchestrated a ruse to hoodwink the shareholders.”

Thanks to the new Michigan law, all the power plant in Litchfield needed was some “off-the-shelf” hardware to be installed and the plant could start selling power. But that wasn’t the message that Foy and the Moores told shareholders. They represented the Michigan plant as something akin to the Cedar Hill plant—a “reference,” or proof-of-concept plant. 

In June 2018, InnerPoint shareholders were notified the company was insolvent—that essentially InnerPoint had continued down the dire path it had been on. The letter described their investment as a “total loss,” though in many other respects was light on specifics. “It just basically says, Look, the company’s dissolved. Its assets are getting liquidated. It’s going to dust,” says Nixon.

In October of that year, Foy and the Moores appeared for a ceremonial groundbreaking of the Michigan Hub power plant in Litchfield. The event received local press coverage. “The project, now in its first phase, has a price tag of more than $100 million, and the potential to create up to 75 full-time jobs,” reported the Hillsdale Daily News. Perhaps a nod to the Moores’ forebearers, a barley manufacturing company was to be on site as well. The Associated Press published a short dispatch.

This did not go unnoticed by some of the investors, who not all that long ago had been told the company was worthless. “They start circulating it amongst themselves,” says Nixon. “Like, Hey, what the hell happened? This is the same company.’”

Those shareholders filed a lawsuit, originally in Greene County, in 2019. 

The lawsuit ended up being what is technically called a shareholder derivative action, meaning the plaintiffs are suing on behalf of the company. It’s somewhat analogous to a class action. The suit accused Moore, the Moore trust, and Foy of breach of fiduciary duty and civil conspiracy. 

“This case was an extremely difficult fight with the defendants and with Commerce Bank and other parties to get documents,” says Nixon. “A lot of the hottest documents in this case we didn’t get until the last eight months.”

He adds, “We didn’t fully understand what had happened until, like, this year.”

Placzek says that key evidence of wrongdoing came to light in documents that were produced by Commerce Bank related to the trust, rather than from the defendants directly. “So the case kind of broke free from documents that the bank ended up producing that the defendants didn’t have,” he says.

At trial, Nixon marshalled as evidence PowerPoint slides created for the “secret meetings” of Foy and the Moores as well as emails drafted by the Moores’ attorney. “Thankfully they put this stuff in an email or else we maybe would have never found out about it,” he says.

Thanks to the emails and other records, lawyers for the shareholders were able to show instances where Foy and the Moores seemed to be developing a narrative to try to convince shareholders of something that wasn’t true. Nixon was able to put those side by side with other documents showing what was really happening around the same time.

Nixon says that he could have spent all day listing the technical breaches of fiduciary duty he believes the men committed, but for the sake of the jury he had to focus on the big picture. 

The trial lasted two weeks, with the jury delivering its verdict in favor of the plaintiffs late in the evening Friday. 

The value of the trusts came up during the punitive damages portion of the trial that followed. It’s during this phase that a jury decides what amount is an appropriate punishment for defendants after they’ve been ruled against. Attorneys for the investors said the trusts for which the Moores are the trustees are worth hundreds of millions. “Punish them with the wealth they worshipped,” said Tony Simon, another one of the investors’ attorneys. The jury ultimately hit the Moores, their trust, and Foy a verdict just shy of $56 million, including a $28 million punitive hit to the trusts. 

At one point, Nixon compared Foy and the descendants of the city’s most famous beer barons disfavorably to bank robbers. “At least a bank robber’s honest, they pull out a gun and say, Give me all your money.”