Senator Jim Justice, a Republican and former governor of West Virginia, has agreed to pay over $5m (£3.9m) in long-overdue taxes, just hours after being sued by US tax authorities.
The first-term senator and his wife reached the settlement following a lawsuit accusing the couple of having "neglected or refused to make full payment" on taxes from 2009.
Justice, who led the state from 2017 until he took office as a senator in 2025, entered politics after decades running his family's coal empire, which controlled dozens of mines across several states.
At a media briefing in October, Justice called the tax assessment against him, which was levied in 2015, "politically motivated".
"It's just a situation that big companies deal with all the time," he said. "You saw all the stuff that President Trump dealt with."
