A Swiss company says one of U.S. Sen. Jim Justice’s coal corporations hasn’t paid it the $1.5 million as agreed to in a 2020 agreement, even after a federal court ruled the Justice firm was liable for that amount plus arbitration costs and interest.
Now, a federal judge has recommended that the same court grant the Swiss company’s request to require the Republican West Virginia senator's firm to produce cashflow spreadsheets that the judge says could help determine if the senator’s business transferred assets to other entities to hide them and avoid honoring the agreement.
U.S. Magistrate Judge C. Kailani Memmer’s recommendation filed in a Virginia federal court Thursday advised the presiding district judge to order Justice’s Bluestone Coal Sales Corp. to produce the cashflow spreadsheets within 10 days for Swiss raw materials trader VISA Commodities AG.
In November 2022, the Virginia Western District Court similarly ruled Bluestone Coal Sales was liable for $1.5 million plus arbitration costs and interest, enforcing an April 2022 order from a London-based arbitrator.
Bluestone Coal Sales agreed to pay $1.5 million in an April 2021 settlement agreement after failing to supply 70,000 metric tons of coal under a November 2020 sales agreement.
Memmer’s recommendation extends a long history of court findings that Justice family coal companies have failed to timely produce documents after not honoring business agreements.
Spreadsheet said to track daily flow of funds Â
As part of a post-judgment legal discovery process stemming from VISA Commodities not getting its payment from Bluestone due four years ago this month, VISA Commodities deposed a treasury vice president for a group of entities to which Bluestone belongs.
That executive, Summer Harrison, testified during a February 2025 deposition that she maintains a separate spreadsheet to track the daily flow of funds, according to court records.
Harrison testified that it “may not be 100% correct, because it's just something I maintain for myself.â€
Memmer disagreed with Bluestone’s assertion in a May filing that VISA Commodities already has “all of the information it needs†from bank statements Bluestone provided. The judge noted Harrison was asked to identify details contained in bank statements but could not do so and instead referred to the requested spreadsheets for details, such as the owner of an account receiving a transfer.
Memmer observed that Bluestone counsel previously agreed to produce the spreadsheets within seven days of Harrison’s deposition and that Bluestone counsel didn’t respond to VISA Commodities counsel in March 2025 after the Justice company didn’t provide the spreadsheets in that time frame.
VISA Commodities had contended the spreadsheets are not duplicative because, unlike the bank statements, they identify the entity or account owner associated with each deposit or transfer.
In November 2022, the court approved VISA Commodities’ request for the $1.5 million, plus arbitration and legal costs in British pounds sterling totaling the equivalent of $43,000 as of June 2022.
The order also awarded VISA Commodities 5% in interest from the due dates of three Bluestone-promised installments of $500,000 and from the April arbitration judgment against Bluestone until dates of payment.
Justice son's activity scrutinized in separate caseÂ
Justice pledged to put his adult children in charge of his family’s business operations after becoming governor in 2017.
In an April 2025 court filing, a Kentucky tobacco warehouse company and an affiliated firm said two Justice coal company executives, including Justice’s son, James C. “Jay†Justice, stopped paying a daily contempt fine amid their noncompliance with a court order to share evidence in the case.
The filing alleged the defendants’ tax returns and other documents prepared from a general ledger show Jay Justice owes James C. Justice Companies nearly $32 million for shareholder loans made to him.
The filing cites two April 2022 ledger entries the plaintiffs say show that despite James C. Justice Companies entered what appeared to be a Virginia land transfer as a total loss in a 2016 asset disposal report, its affiliate sold the property six years later for a $10.1 million profit.
New London Tobacco Market and Fivemile Energy brought the case in 2012 after Justice’s Kentucky Fuel Corp. failed to mine coal under an agreement following the plaintiffs’ assignment of rights to mine coal in eastern Kentucky to the defendants in exchange for a cut of the mined coal.
Justice entities had $300M+ debt to Virginia bankÂ
Martinsville, Virginia-based Carter Bankshares Inc., holding company of Carter Bank, reported in April that Justice entities had paid $56.8 million of a $301.9 million debt as of March 31.
Carter Bank scheduled an auction of Greenbrier Sporting Club property that featured prominently in the Justice business empire last year to help satisfy a nine-figure Justice family debt to the bank. The auction was later canceled, and the Justice family and the bank announced the settlement of the dispute, in which the bank has sought $300 million-plus in debt admitted by the Justices.
Five of Justice’s coal companies again failed to provide retirees health care coverage in violation of a collective bargaining agreement, retirees and the United Mine Workers of America union said in an April 2025 court filing.
The reported failures were the latest in a yearslong string of intermittent lapses in contractually promised health care and prescription drug coverage that retirees have said resulted in the loss of critical medications.
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