Aubrey McClendon has been called a pioneer and a natural gas evangelist. Now he might just be the architect of his own destruction. Three years after being forced out of Chesapeake Energy Corp., the natural gas company he co-founded, the 56-year-old is facing allegations he worked with an unidentified competitor to keep the price of leasing drilling rights artificially low. McClendon is accused of orchestrating a scheme between two “large oil and gas companies” to not bid against each other for leases in northwest Oklahoma from December 2007 to March 2012, the Justice Department said Tuesday in a statement. The charge is “wrong and unprecedented,” McClendon said in a separate statement. The grand jury indictment comes after the hydraulic fracturing process McClendon championed for accessing trapped oil and gas has caused prices to crater. Chesapeake has sunk 39 percent this year, including losing […]