Coal company owned by Sen. Jim Justice’s family faces court hearing over continued failure to clean up mines 

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
November 13, 2025

CONTACT
Dan Radmacher, Media Specialist, (276) 289-1018, dan@appvoices.org 

ABINGDON, Va. — In a federal court hearing regarding a motion to hold A&G Coal Company in contempt for violating a January 2023 consent decree, attorneys for the company argued that it doesn’t have enough money to meet the terms of the decree, including funding mine cleanup at three delinquent mines. But attorneys representing the conservation groups that brought the original lawsuit presented evidence that executives for companies owned by the family of West Virginia Sen. Jim Justice — including A&G — routinely move money between the companies as they feel is warranted.

Justice’s son Jay regularly moves money between various coal companies that he owns along with his father and other close family members, according to a transcript of testimony from a different case involving the senator’s family companies’ failure to pay fines for violations of worker safety standards.

In that testimony, Stephen Ball, executive vice president and general counsel for A&G and other Justice family companies, explained how revenue-generating companies within the sprawling Justice coal empire routinely provide “intercompany loans,” also referred to as “intercompany advances,” to other subsidiaries to pay regulatory fines, vendor debts and operating expenses. These advances are not generally paid back.

Ball said evaluating which subsidiaries had money, which had debts or expenses, and whether to move any money from one company to another is “a daily process.” 

During the contempt hearing, attorneys with Appalachian Mountain Advocates, the nonprofit public interest law firm representing the conservation groups, entered Ball’s testimony into evidence and argued it showed that the company could get the resources needed to comply with the consent decree. 

That decree settled a lawsuit brought by the Southern Appalachian Mountain Stewards, Appalachian Voices, and the Sierra Club over A&G’s years-long failure to reclaim three mountaintop removal coal mines in Wise County. It established deadlines for cleaning up the mines, imposed a ban on mining coal on those mines, and required that fines be paid to a local watershed group if the reclamation deadlines are missed or other requirements are violated.

In one instance from the fall of 2024, Jay Justice made an intercompany advance of “hundreds of thousands of dollars” from one company to another in order to finance the startup of a mining operation in West Virginia, according to Ball’s testimony. Around that same time, A&G had filed a motion to modify the consent decree in Virginia, claiming that the company lacked the funds necessary to comply. This was months after A&G had fallen behind on reclamation deadlines, failed to pay fines, and mined coal in violation of the court-ordered decree.

“It’s shameful for this company, which is directly controlled by Jay Justice, to tell not only the court, but also the communities who live next to these dangerous, unreclaimed mines, that A&G can’t afford to follow the law at the same time that Mr. Justice is marshalling resources towards opening up a mine in West Virginia,” said Willie Dodson, Coal Impacts Program Manager at Appalachian Voices. 

“It is clear from Mr. Ball’s own words that there is not a meaningful financial distinction between different subsidiaries in the Justice family’s coal business,” said Judy Gayer of the Virginia chapter of the Sierra Club. “Mr. Ball has plainly stated that Jay Justice alone chooses when and for what reasons to transfer funds from one company to another.”

Conservation groups filed the motion to hold A&G in contempt on Oct. 31, 2024. On the same day, A&G filed a motion asking the court to modify the consent decree in order to push back deadlines and allow A&G to mine coal. 

Judge James Jones adjourned today’s hearing without ruling on either motion. “We are so sick of this Justice family’s mines wrecking our mountains, waters, and communities,” said Taysha DeVaughan of Southern Appalachian Mountain Stewards who resides in Big Stone Gap, Virginia, a few miles downriver from the A&G operations. “At some point, there has to be accountability. We want Jay Justice to cough up the money needed in order to hire local workers to reclaim these mines. It’s the right thing to do for everyone involved.”