Amweld retirees hoodwinked

Amweld retirees hoodwinked

What has happened to the retirees of Amweld Building Products, a company that operated in Niles and Garrettsville, is wrong on so many levels that it demands action on a number of fronts.

Not the least of those is an investigation into the possibility of criminal prosecution for what appears on its face to be a case of theft in that someone deducted hundreds of dollars in copayments from Amweld retirement checks for months after health coverage was secretly cancelled.

In response to a Vindicator inquiry, Ohio Attorney General Richard Cordray said Friday that he has asked the head of his criminal justice division to look into the Amweld case. He’ll be discussing the issues involved in the case with Trumbull County Prosecutor Dennis Watkins.

Meanwhile, U.S. Rep. Tim Ryan of Niles, D-17th, has asked the U.S. Department of Labor to investigate the cancellation of Amweld retiree health-care benefits.

The congressman sent a letter Friday to the Labor Department seeking a probe into the Amweld Building Products LLC pension fund. Because of multiple bankruptcies and creditor sales, Ryan’s letter said, the company has passed through the hands of Amweld Building Products LLC, ARK II Manufacturing LLC, and Amweld International LLC. All three companies are apparently controlled by Patriarch Partners LLC.

Show us the money

No one is accepting responsibility for the health care plan, yet someone obviously has the thousands of dollars that were withheld from the retirees’ checks in January and February. Someone made the decision to tell the insurer, Aetna, that the retirees were no longer covered, effective Jan. 1. Yet, whoever did so, didn’t have the decency to inform the retirees or see to it that money was no longer being taken from the retirees’ benefits. Someone has the tens of thousands of dollars that have been misappropriated. One Amweld retiree in Howland says that as of March 1, he was still having $770 deducted for health coverage from his $1,342 pension check.

That’s not an oversight or a bookkeeping error. It’s the conversion of one person’s money to another person’s use without cause. In short, theft.

Amweld retirees only learned about the problem when doctors and hospitals started telling them their care was no longer covered.

These are tough economic times, and everyone is at risk in a bankruptcy. Packard Delphi’s salaried retirees know that. But they were given notice that their health coverage was being terminated and could appeal — although without success — to a bankruptcy judge.

It’s good that Cordray and his office will take an aggressive stance in the Amweld case. It will at least send the message to others that there will be consequences if they choose to follow Amweld’s path.