Gov. Sarah Palin's signature accomplishment — a contract to build a 1,715-mile pipeline to bring natural gas from Alaska to the Lower 48 — emerged from a flawed bidding process that narrowed the field to a company with ties to her administration, an Associated Press investigation shows.

The leader of Palin's pipeline team had been a partner at a lobbying firm where she worked on behalf of a TransCanada subsidiary. Also, that woman's former business partner at the lobbying firm was TransCanada's lead private lobbyist on the pipeline deal, interacting with legislators in the weeks before the vote to grant TransCanada the contract. Plus, a former TransCanada executive served as an outside consultant to Palin's pipeline team.

—Under a different set of rules four years earlier, TransCanada had offered to build the pipeline without a state subsidy; under Palin, the company could receive a maximum $500 million.

Labels: corruption, earmarks, ethics

The office of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin has told a state public employee union that if it wants to gain access to previously undisclosed emails from the Palin's office they’re going to have to pony up some serious cash.

Palin's office wants $88,000 to fulfill a Freedom of Information Act request filed recently by the state's Public Safety Employees Association, the union that represents the governor former brother-in-law, Mike Wooten, an Alaska state trooper, who was involved in a bitter divorce and child custody suit with Palin's sister.

The union alleges Palin’s office illegally accessed the trooper's personnel and workers compensation file and disseminated confidential information to a top Alaska state trooper official in an attempt to get Wooten fired.

In August, the union filed an ethics complaint against Palin alleging unauthorized access to Wooten's personnel files.

John Cyr, the director of the PSEA, also filed a FOIA request for emails after an audio recording surfaced in July that showed Palin's director of state boards and commissions, Frank Bailey, telephoned police Lt. Rodney Dial last February to inquire about union issues involving state troopers and outlined disparaging details about Wooten's finances and personal behavior that appear to have come from his personnel file.

Labels: corruption, secrecy, Troopergate

The Republican Sarah Palin and her officials in the Alaskan state government drew on the work of at least six scientists known to be sceptical about the dangers and causes of global warming, to back efforts to stop polar bears being protected as an endangered species, the Guardian can disclose. Some of the scientists were funded by the oil industry.

In official submissions to the US government's consultation on the status of the polar bear, Palin and her team referred to at least six scientists who have questioned either the existence of warming as a largely man-made phenomenon or its severity. One paper was partly funded by the US oil company ExxonMobil.

The status of the polar bear has become a battleground in the debate on global warming. In May the US department of the interior rejected Palin's objections and listed the bear as a threatened species, saying that two-thirds of the world's polar bears were likely to be extinct by 2050 due to the rapid melting of the sea ice. Palin, governor of Alaska and the Republican nominee for US vice-president, responded last month by suing the federal government, to try to overturn the ruling. The case will be heard in January.

Though the state of Alaska has no polar bear specialists on its staff, the governor's stance has pitted it against the combined scientific fire-power of the US Fish and Wildlife Service, the US Geological Survey, and world experts on the mammal.

In its lawsuit, Alaska said it opposed the endangered label partly because the listing would "deter activities such as ... oil and gas exploration and development". Oil companies recently bid $2.7bn (£1.5bn) for rights to explore the Chuckchi sea, an established polar bear habitat.

The threatened species status might also impede the building of an Alaskan natural gas pipeline, which Palin has called the "will of God".

Labels: corruption, environment

Palin's office approved a state job for a friend and campaign aide with whom she shared a land investment, financial records and interviews over the past two weeks show. She hired a former lobbyist for a pipeline company to help oversee a multibillion-dollar deal with that same company.

She named a police chief accused of harassment to head the state police. And she sent campaign e-mails on her city hall account while serving as mayor of Wasilla -- conduct for which she later turned in an oil commissioner on ethics charges.

These incidents raise "some serious questions about her judgment and serious questions about her standards of ethics in public service," said James Thurber, director of American University's Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies in Washington. Suggesting a real estate investment partner for a job "may be acceptable in Alaska; it would not be acceptable in Washington, D.C., a place whose norms she wants to change."

Labels: corruption