Rep. TJ Cox (D-Fresno) has officially exited the Canadian gold mining firm he helped start in 2013, corporate filings show.
Tiffany Stecker and Stephen Lee of Bloomberg Environment first reported the news.
In early June, Cox told Stecker that Constellation Mines, Ltd. was “not really a company.”
“[A] company that has no assets is not really a company, so it never really had any operations,” Cox told Stecker during a press scrum. [mnky_ads id=”8865″]
However, in 2012, Cox contacted investors to solicit investment of $250,000 for a gold mining operation in British Columbia, emails obtained by The Sun show.
In the email, Cox said the firm had roughly $650,000 invested in the mine.
According to another email, Cox continued to visit the British Columbia mine long after the company – known as Defot Creek Mining – had forfeited its claim.
A week after The Sun released Cox’s 2012 emails, Constellation Mines, Ltd. filed paperwork to remove Cox and another Valley resident, Joseph Rossi, as directors in the firm.
Despite filing the paperwork on June 17, Cox’s formal exit date from the firm is Feb. 3.
Bloomberg reported that the February date was days after he was named chairman of the Natural Resources subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations. [mnky_ads id=”7798″]
A number of residents of the 21st Congressional district filed an ethics complaint against Cox for failing to disclose a number of holdings in private businesses – including Constellation Mines, Ltd.
“I’m updating my financial disclosures from when I was a candidate for Congress to reflect all of my business interests,” Cox told Bloomberg in a statement. “I’ve seen first-hand how red tape suffocates businesses in America.” [mnky_ads id=”8874″]
