On March 2, Aubrey McClendon—founder and CEO of American Energy Partners, and co-founder, CEO, and chairman of Chesapeake Energy—died in a fiery one-person car crash, where it appears he deliberately drove his vehicle into a concrete barrier around a highway overpass. This car accident occurred the day after he was indicted by a federal grand jury on charges of conspiring with an unnamed company to rig the price of oil and gas leases in the state of Oklahoma. The allegations further specified that McClendon orchestrated a campaign to keep bid prices down from 2007 to 2012, while he was chief executive of Chesapeake Energy Corp. amid a land-leasing boom for drilling rights across the United States.
McClendon had previously had his share of trouble when it was revealed in 2012 that he had engaged in at least two major conflict of interest scams against the very company he not only founded but ran as CEO and chairman of the goard. The first conflict of interest revolved around...