February 14, 2025 — Last summer, an unsettling quiet cloaked the isolated Southwest Alaska community of King Cove as the town’s economic engine — a sprawling seafood processing plant — sat shuttered.
Bunkhouses, once filled with hundreds of workers during the peak salmon harvest, were vacant. Four diesel generators that had rumbled day and night were stilled. The plant docks, once lined with boats and circled by fish-scavenging gulls, were empty.
The closure resulted from the financial implosion of the plant’s owner, Peter Pan Seafood. Some local fishing boat captains directed their ire at company leaders who accepted their seafood, then failed to pay them.
They dwelled far less on a surprising, largely silent, powerhouse investor in the plant: the state of Alaska.
The trustees of Alaska’s Permanent Fund, an $80 billion savings account whose earnings provide residents with annual dividends and help pay for government services, decided to invest more money in companies with ties to Alaska. More than $29 million went to Peter Pan, according to figures provided by the Permanent Fund’s current board chair.
The deal ended disastrously last year with the company’s liquidation, hundreds of unpaid creditors and a likely total loss for Alaskans on their investment.
A ProPublica investigation, in collaboration with the Anchorage Daily News and Northern Journal, revealed that the Permanent Fund’s leadership and its hired management firm ignored or overlooked warning signs leading up to the deal.
Read the full article at Anchorage Daily News