Enter Schuler, a 46-year-old Columbus-area attorney and son of a longtime state lawmaker. Then-county commissioner Michael Fox knew the younger Schuler personally; they were undergraduates together at Miami University, according to an indictment released Thursday, Oct. 29.
Fox has said he also knew that Schuler had just made roughly $11 million from the sale of a business to Tyco. The county needed a savior, Fox said, and Schuler needed a tax shelter.
“Once we learned of those financial troubles we explored several solutions. In our opinion, the cleanest way to deal with those problems was to find a white knight,” Fox wrote in a 2002 e-mail about the deal.
Schuler created a company called Anwalt Fiber Holdings LLC in December 2001 and purchased NORMAP for $400,000 plus 12 of the system’s fibers in February 2002, records show. He bought the company from Toledo-based SFT, Inc., which had a contract to build the system — and had already been paid $1.37 million — but was facing bankruptcy, according to records.
Schuler then renegotiated the contract so that Cincinnati Bell installed the system, and was paid the remainder of NORMAP’s original contract, or roughly $1.8 million, through 2003, according to county records.
According to the indictment released Thursday, Schuler arranged in March and September 2002 to have an unnamed business associate transfer a total of $460,000 to the bank account of Fox’s company, Fox Development. Fox used some of the money to pay off a personal loan worth $303,160 to Fifth Third Bank, the indictment states.
The indictment alleges Schuler then paid Fox $47,000 in 2004 — through Schuler’s business contacts and other companies — and that Fox helped Schuler sell NORMAP in May 2004 for more than $1.5 million.
The indictment states Fox didn’t report these payments on his taxes or financial disclosure statements on these years, as required by law.
In addition to fraud charges, Schuler faces perjury charges for allegedly lying in 2008 to a grand jury about the money given to Fox. He told the grand jury the money was a loan to an individual identified as “S.S.,” when the indictment claims it was a “bribe/kickback for the contract defendant (Schuler) had with Butler County.”
The unsealing of the indictment against Schuler Thursday came one day after a memorial in the Ohio Senate for his father, Sen. Robert Schuler. The senator — whose district included all of Warren County and parts of Hamilton County — died in office in June.
Al Hencheck Jr., of Loveland, a family friend of the Schulers, said Thursday the charges against the younger Schuler are “just totally out of character with Rob.”
“I suspect that as things come out, he’ll be exonerated completely,” Hencheck said.
Contact this reporter at (513) 820-2175 or jsweigart@coxohio.com.
About the Author
