Karen B. Wright

Industry: Natural Gas/Manufacturing
Primary Company: Ariel Corporation
Age: Born ~1956¹
Location: Mount Vernon, Ohio
Estimated Worth: Unconfirmed

Background

Karen Buchwald Wright is the CEO of Ariel Corp., a producer of natural gas compressors in Mount Vernon, Ohio.²

Her husband, Tom Rastin,³ is Ariel Corp’s vice president of marketing and engineering, and a member of the board of directors of the Ariel Foundation, which Wright founded in 2009.⁴ Both Karen and Tom attended a Koch network event in 2010.⁵

Ariel Corp. was founded by Wright’s father, Jim Buchwald. She took over the business in 2001 after having four kids and getting a divorce from her former husband, John Wright, who had served as a president of the company⁶ but departed following the divorce.⁷

Wright has invested millions of dollars in her hometown of Mount Vernon. As The Columbus Dispatch reported: “It must be said: Karen Buchwald Wright is a wealthy woman, especially in this city of 17,000, where the median household income is about $36,000 and where a Bentley appears only slightly more often than Bigfoot. Wright doesn’t brag or downplay this, just accepts it as fact. When asked why a park project didn’t get off the ground before she got involved, she said, simply: ‘ I’m the only one with the money.’”⁸

Karen B. Wright also founded the Ariel Foundation as a private family foundation in 2009 and serves as its supervising director, chairman, and president.⁹

Karen Wright began her career at the Ariel Corporation in 1980, and has served as chairman, president, and CEO of the company since 2001. Karen Wright is also a board member of the American Petroleum Institute, according to publicly available IRS Form 990 filings.

Funding

Political Spending

Both Karen Wright and Tom Rastin were on a 2018 list of Ohio’s top political donors. As of that report, they had given more than $3.3 million to candidates and political groups including Mike DeWine, the state attorney general who ran for governor; Rep. Bob Gibbs; State Rep. Keith Faber, who ran for Ohio auditor; and congressional candidate Anthony Gonzalez. According to that report, they “made a pair of $200,000-plus donations to the Republican National Congressional Committee, the campaign arm for congressional Republicans.”

According to the original filing with the U.S. Federal Election Commission, Karen Wright made two donations to the NRCC of $101,700 and another of $101,500, both on February 13, 2018. Similarly, Rastin made a donation of $101,700 and another of $101,400 on February 14, for a total of $406,300 between the two in one month.¹⁰

Below is a sample of Karen B. Wright’s political spending via campaign finance data exported from the FEC. Note that while efforts are made to ensure the accuracy of this data, errors may have been introduced in the original finance records.

View the attached spreadsheet for a complete list of Karen Wright’s political spending by year (.xlsx).