Will Ohio Teacher State Pension Be Held In Contempt?

Or will the secretive pension's claim that it must seek approval from its Wall Street investment managers prior to any court-mandated disclosure be accepted?

After 5 years of litigation ended last month with the Court of Appeals ordering disclosure of here-to-for secret investment documents, STRS Ohio claims it must seek approval from its Wall Street money managers to release the information to the public.

On May 6th, the Court of Appeals of Ohio (Tenth Appellate District) handed us a decisive victory in our longstanding battle for access to public records from the highly-secretive State Teachers Retirement System of Ohio. Once the appeal period had run on that decision, this week we asked how and when STRS intended to produce the documents, as ordered by the court. Our hope was that after all these years of litigation it would not be necessary to bring an action to hold the Board in contempt.

By way of background, since early 2021, we have asked the $96 billion public pension to disclose to the public all contracts, including any private placement memoranda, offering documents and subscription agreements, between STRS and its investment managers. And for the last 4 years, the pension has fought hard to keep its shady investment dealings secret.

Here’s the letter our counsel sent to counsel for STRS Ohio this week:

And here’s the alarming response we received from STRS:

As your letter received on June 23, 2025, indicates, STRS elected not to appeal the Tenth District’s decision to the Ohio Supreme Court.

Consistent with the Tenth District’s Decision, STRS intends to provide the following items in its possession relative to the Investment Manager Request:

• Private Placement Memoranda provided to STRS by its Investment Managers;

• Subscription Agreements between STRS and its Investment Managers;

• Limited Partnership Agreements between STRS and its Investment Managers; and

• Side Letters between STRS and its Investment Managers.

As STRS has indicated to you and your client, over 100 investment managers are managing more than 400 private funds in which STRS was invested during the covered period. While STRS has begun the process of identifying responsive documents applicable to each such fund and investment manager, it is also contractually required to notify each investment manager of such request and offer them the opportunity to assert any applicable exemptions (emphasis added) under Ohio’s Sunshine Laws (e.g., trade secrets or IP).

Therefore, STRS intends to begin notifying its investment managers the week of June 30 that STRS has received a records request for their documents and to provide them with 14 days to redact or withhold records that are not subject to disclosure under applicable exceptions to Ohio’s Public Records Act (emphasis added).

STRS will then provide the respective records to you on a rolling basis as responses from each investment manager are received.

STRS further plans to submit an affidavit verifying there are no additional responsive Panda Investment records other than the ones initially sent by STRS and as supplemented during the Tenth District briefing.

Amye Bensenhaver is co-founder and co-director of the Kentucky Open Government Coalition and a 25 year veteran of the Kentucky Office of the Attorney General. As an assistant attorney general, Bensenhaver focused exclusively on administrative adjudication of open records and open meetings disputes. Here’s what she had to say about our victory and the STRS response:

Siedle’s victory in State ex rel. Edward Siedle v. State Teachers Retirement System of Ohio, represents a tremendous victory not just for pensioners attempting to penetrate the wall of silence erected by public pension systems to evade accountability and transparency both to their members and to nonmember taxpayers, but to all public records requester who experience agency imposition of based on the same overused pretextual barriers — vagueness, overbreadth, and burdensomeness. The Court systematically rejects each of these arguments, advanced by STRS, and provides an invaluable roadmap for requesters seeking to refute similar, if not identical, false agency claims to circumvent public records laws. We’ve seen these claims proliferate in Kentucky at an exponential rate, and highly recommend State ex rel. Edward Siedle v. State Teachers Retirement System of Ohio as the corrective to bureaucratic evasion based on claims of vagueness, overbreadth, and burdensomeness.

News that STRS will attempt to evade the Ohio court’s final opinion alters these observation not a whit. The court should see this strategy for exactly what it is: the ultimate blame shifting for public agency secrecy. This, too, we have seen in Kentucky. The pension system’s claim that it must seek approval from the investment manager for any disclosure is a direct affront to pensioners and the public. It will fail under judicial review (emphasis added).

In conclusion, our counsel will bring an action to hold the Board in contempt for its efforts to evade the court’s final opinion. In Ohio, and across the nation, public pensions today agree that they will work together with Wall Street to keep the abuses and damages related to their private investment dealings from public scrutiny. Compliance with public records laws has long been abandoned and the public has no clue about the abuses funds and their managers are working so hard to keep secret.