Jury clears St. Marks of fraud allegations

A tribal jury found Chippewa Cree Business Committee Chairman Ken St. Marks not liable for the charges the committee has accused him of, a press release from St. Marks' attorneys has announced

The Chippewa Cree jury also found the tribe is liable for more than $200,000 that the tribal government did not pay him.

The plaintiffs, Rocky Boy's Reservation of Montana and the Chippewa Cree Construction Corp., claimed St. Marks and his company defrauded the tribe of $2.9 million for work he did on the Rocky Boy's/North Central Montana Rural Water System.

"The Tribe and some of its Council members then used the factually unsupported allegations as a pretext to repeatedly remove St. Marks from office, unsuccessfully used the unsupported allegations to attempt to influence voters and prevent St. Marks repeated reelections to office; and unsuccessfully used the allegations to try to defend against St. Marks' federal whistleblower case," the press release reads.

St. Marks was elected to office and thrown out three times since he won the general election in 2012. His term is up in 2016, but he is currently eligible to run again.

In his press release, St. Marks said: "Over and over my name has been cleared but the Tribe and Corporation ... maintained these malicious claims. They used substantial public funds to maintain a vendetta against me, even when they were getting in trouble by the Unites States. What's even more troubling is they didn't once seem to consider the welfare of the Chippewa Cree Tribe, its government, or its members. I realize these claims weren't initiated by the current composition of the Business Committee, but we sure are left to clean up the mess!"

Phone calls to St. Marks, the tribal offices, and the law firm Fredericks Peebles & Morgan, which represented the tribe, went unanswered.