House Democrats are investigating whether executives at a uranium company operating in Utah engaged in possible insider trading by making investments days before President Donald Trump opened a nearby national monument to mining.
California Rep. Jared Huffman, ranking member of the House Natural Resources Committee, and Oregon Rep. Maxine Dexter, who chairs the Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee, pushed Ross Bhappu, president and CEO of Energy Fuels, in a letter Monday to explain whether he knew Trump would shrink Utah’s Bears Ears National Monument before investing in the company.
Bhappu bought 74,000 shares of Energy Fuels on July 7, while Bruce Hansen, the company’s chair of the board, bought 4,000 shares of stock a day later, according to the letter. Trump on July 13 signed orders reducing the size of Bears Ears by more than 90 percent, opening nearly 3 million acres of public land — and uranium-rich areas of the San Juan Basin — to mining.
But Curtis Moore, Energy Fuels’ senior vice president of marketing and corporate development, rejected any assertion of improper activity in an email.
