Gov. Brian Schweitzer on Thursday asked the state attorney general to investigate whether the former owner of a power plant near Thompson Falls deceived regulators last fall to avoid paying more than $1 million in fines.

The governor's request follows accusations by two environmental groups and others that former Thompson River Co-gen co-owner Barry Bates provided false or misleading information to the state Department of Environmental Quality.

In a letter to the governor this week, the Clark Fork Coalition, the Montana Environmental Information Center and more than a dozen Sanders County residents alleged that Bates wasn't forthcoming about the company's financial situation and its plans to sell the troubled plant to an investment firm.

The letter asked Schweitzer to investigate those allegations and conduct a formal review of the DEQ's enforcement policies.

Schweitzer responded Thursday that he was taking action on both requests.

''You have brought forward serious allegations, and I believe they deserve formal review,'' he wrote.

A call to Bates' office in Kalispell was not immediately returned.

The conflict stems from a 2006 DEQ enforcement action in which the agency fined the power plant nearly $1.9 million for violations of the Montana Clean Air Act in 2005. The plant voluntarily shut down in October 2006 and has remained closed.

The DEQ tried for over a year to collect the $1.9 million fine, but Thompson River Co-gen officials said the company was in dire financial straits and couldn't afford to pay.

Last fall, the DEQ agreed to let Thompson River Co-gen hire an independent firm to analyze its ability to pay the fine.

The analyst, Massachusetts-based Industrial Economics Inc., determined that with the generating plant shut down, Thompson River Co-gen was carrying a heavy debt load and its project overrun costs were piling up.

The report concluded that the $175,000 Thompson River Co-gen had set aside to pay fines was the most it could afford.

The state received that financial report on Oct. 23. On Nov. 9, a new corporation, Thompson River Power LLC, was registered with the state by Wayzata Investment Partners, a private equity and hedge fund group based in Minnesota.

A week later, the state settled with Thompson River Co-gen for $200,000, or about 10 percent of the original fine. Later that month, Thompson River Power took ownership of the plant. The company is in the process of making improvements so it can get the plant up and running.

Details of the plant's sale have not been made public. A woman who answered the phone at Wayzata on Thursday said, ''No comment,'' and hung up.

Critics of Thompson River Co-gen claim company officials knew the plant was going to be sold and didn't disclose that information to the DEQ or the analyst prior to the settlement.

''These deals don't happen overnight,'' Anne Hedges, program director for MEIC in Helena, told the Great Falls Tribune.

According to the independent financial report, one of the factors that would have affected the plant's future ability to pay the $1.9 million fine was whether it could be sold to an entity that could operate it more economically. The report found there was ''no such possibility on the horizon.''

John Arrigo, administrator of the DEQ's enforcement division, said he was ''just as surprised as everybody else'' about the sale.

''Essentially the day after we communicated with (Thompson River Co-gen's) attorney that we were going to accept an offer of $200,000, I got an e-mail from a representative of Wayzata that said, 'We just bought Thompson River Co-gen.' ''

Arrigo said it's unclear how close the two companies were to striking a deal at the time the financial analysis was conducted and the settlement negotiations took place. He said neither company revealed that information to the state before the settlement.

''It would have been nice to know,'' Arrigo said.

But Arrigo and Jane Amdahl, an attorney with the DEQ, both said the information may not have affected the state's decision to settle.

''If we'd gone to court, it's possible we wouldn't have gotten anything at all -- or we could have gotten $200,000 after having expended considerable state resources,'' Amdahl said. ''Ultimately, I can't say the DEQ would have ended up with more money even if there had been full disclosure.''

Hedges and Matt Clifford, conservation director and staff attorney for the Missoula-based Clark Fork Coalition, said one of the biggest problems with the state's handling of the Thompson River Co-gen fine was that it ''bent over backward'' to accommodate Bates by letting an independent firm analyze the company's ability to pay. They say there's no way to know what the company knew about a possible sale -- and when -- because the state doesn't have any of Thompson River Co-gen's financial information on the record.

But Arrigo said Thompson River Co-gen wouldn't release confidential financial information to the state, where it would then become a matter of public record. He said the state agreed to the independent analysis because it didn't have the staff to conduct its own in-depth financial analysis and it ''wanted to keep moving on the case.''

''We said that was fine with us, as long as they put the appropriate documents in the hands of the consultants,'' Amdahl said. She added that the DEQ chose analysts from Industrial Economics Inc. because they're ''considered the top people in the country for figuring out situations like this.''

Clifford and Hedges argued that the state should have demanded to know more details about the company's finances because of Bates' history. The letter to the governor said the DEQ fined Thompson River Co-gen $106,000 in 2004, for violating its air-quality permit on several occasions in 2002.

The same year, the company was forced to repay a $10.5 million subsidized loan when the Montana Board of Investments learned the company falsely asserted it had obtained all the necessary permits to build the plant when, at that time, it had not.

Bates has a history of run-ins with federal authorities. In 1999, a Colorado judge ordered Bates to pay nearly $20,000 in connection to securities fraud charges. In April 2007, a federal judge in Montana ordered Bates to spend three months on house arrest, five years on probation and to pay $300,000 for various federal income tax violations.

Residents and environmental groups also have said the public was misled about the true nature of the Thompson River Co-gen plant. They say plant officials initially told them the generating facility would burn primarily wood waste from a nearby lumber mill; instead, the plant used coal as its primary fuel.