By Nate Monroe, The Tributary
November 28, 2025
An investor lawsuit accusing Florida Power & Light’s parent company, NextEra, and several current and former executives of securities fraud can move forward, a panel of federal appeals judges ruled this week in a remarkable resurrection of the case. The suit, which has two Florida pension funds as the lead plaintiffs, argues that the company made misleading statements as Florida newspapers several years ago uncovered evidence of a wide range of misdeeds, including involvement in efforts to warp Florida elections through the use of “ghost” candidates, use of dirty tricks to acquire Jacksonville’s city-owned electric utility, surveillance of a journalist and attempts to control media coverage.
Last year, U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon dismissed that class-action lawsuit against NextEra, finding that the lead investors had failed to demonstrate that any of the company’s statements during a maelstrom of news coverage about those controversies was sufficiently misleading.
A panel of 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals judges sharply disagreed.
“The complaint has it all: corporate malfeasance, bribery, off-the-books recordkeeping, surveilling journalists, creating ‘ghost’ candidates, corrupting independent media outlets, and a failed acquisition that spiraled into two federal indictments,” Judge Gerald Bard Tjoflat wrote in a 38-page decision, joined by Judges Elizabeth Branch and Embry Kidd.
“When reporters began to uncover traces of the alleged conspiracy, NextEra and FPL executives were quick to put the claims to rest … But after some time, leadership began to backpedal.”
A key episode in the lawsuit is NextEra’s January 25, 2023, announcement that Eric Silagy, FPL’s CEO, was retiring — an abrupt development that utility analysts found unexpected — as well as “unscheduled disclosures about potential legal and reputational risk” that stemmed from some of the allegations that had run in Florida newspapers, which FPL leaders had previously denied.
“That very day, NextEra’s stock plunged 8.7 percent, wiping out more than $14 billion in market capitalization,” Tjoflat wrote.
PSC’s $7 BILLION RATE HIKE
Until this week, it appeared FPL had moved past that series of potentially damaging revelations with few other consequences and retained its status as one of Florida’s most powerful companies, even as bit players from Jacksonville to Miami were convicted of crimes (law enforcement officials have never accused NextEra or its employees of wrongdoing).
After Cannon dismissed the lawsuit last year, a right-wing Florida news site derided media coverage of FPL and crowed that Cannon’s decision amounted to a “crystal-clear outcome again validating the continued claims of innocence made by FPL and its leaders.”
And earlier this month, the Florida Public Service Commission approved FPL’s requested $7 billion, four-year rate hike, which consumer advocates have characterized as the largest such increase in electric bills in United States history.
The commissioners, appointed by Gov. Ron DeSantis, approved that rate hike despite widespread public concerns about affordability and withering criticism from the chief judge on the Florida Supreme Court, who last year sharply rebuked the PSC as a “black box” that had hardly bothered to justify its decision to sign off on the previous FPL rate increase in 2021.
Now, the federal appeals court decision could re-open the company’s old wounds from a series of controversies across Florida. At the center of nearly all of them were operatives of Matrix LLC, an Alabama-based consulting firm that FPL had once employed.
Matrix’s founder, Joe Perkins, and its former CEO, Jeff Pitts, had a falling out, based in part over the company’s work on FPL’s behalf, which Perkins denied ever knowing about. During that feud, internal company records began making their way into the hands of reporters at the Orlando Sentinel, The Florida Times-Union, the Miami Herald and Floodlight, a nonprofit newsroom, that connected FPL to a series of seemingly discrete controversies across Florida.
In a 2020 state Senate race in South Florida, for example, those internal records showed that former Matrix operatives propped up a sham candidate who shared a last name with the incumbent, state Sen. José Javier Rodríguez, whom FPL despised, at least in part because of his opposition at the time to one of the company’s top legislative priorities. “I want you to make his life a living hell … seriously,” Silagy, FPL’s former CEO, emailed two underlings about Rodríguez in 2019. (Silagy later said he regretted his choice of words).
Rodríguez narrowly lost reelection.
RECORDS CONNECT FPL
In Jacksonville, the internal records showed that Matrix operatives worked discreetly on an effort to lure an FPL critic off the City Council with a six-figure job offer at a sham nonprofit and that they surveilled a columnist at The Florida Times-Union who wrote critically about FPL’s efforts to buy the city’s publicly owned electric, water and sewer utility (that columnist is the author of this story).
A watchdog organization also filed an FEC complaint over FPL’s alleged funneling of money through various not-for-profit organizations (the FEC eventually deadlocked along partisan lines, with Republicans in unison against moving the investigation forward, ultimately killing the inquiry).
The records connected FPL to these efforts and others, but the company vigorously denied any role in them, both in statements and during the course of an interview of Silagy at the Times-Union’s office in downtown Jacksonville.
But, the appeals court wrote, after “the dust settled, NextEra leadership appeared to change course.”
On the same day NextEra announced Silagy’s departure, it filed an unscheduled risk disclosure. “While earlier SEC filings also touched on potential risks, the new disclosure was more comprehensive and warned investors of ‘material fines’ and a potential ‘material adverse impact on the reputation’ of NextEra and FPL,” the court wrote.
While not an “admission of wrongdoing,” the court wrote, it was a “notably different tune than (former NextEra CEO Jim Robo’s) earlier statement that there was ‘no basis to any of [the] allegations.’”
To ultimately prevail, the investors suing FPL “still must show material fraud,” the court wrote.
The lead plaintiffs in the case are the City of Hollywood Police Officers Retirement System and the Pembroke Pines Firefighters & Police Officers Pension Fund.
The Tributary is a nonprofit newsroom producing high-impact government accountability and investigative journalism in the public interest. Based in Jacksonville, The Tributary’s mission is to shine a light on systemic problems and solutions, hold those in power accountable, and focus on undercovered topics through collaboration with other news organizations and the community.
Disclosure: The Tributary’s executive editor, Nate Monroe, was the journalist whom FPL and Matrix are alleged to have surveilled. He is also the author of several past columns in The Florida Times-Union that are at issue in this lawsuit and which FPL has criticized in the past.
Nate Monroe can be reached at [email protected].
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