Where do NextEra’s victims go for their apology?

Usually, when the diners are satisfied and the reviews are glowing, you don’t see the chef tossing his toque and walking out the door. And you don’t see the owners holding it open for him.

Pension fund investors and mom-and-pop shareholders alike were satisfied with the stock profits served up by Florida Power & Light on CEO Eric Silagy’s watch.

Why, if it weren’t for the dark money, the Federal Elections Commission complaint, the fake candidates and the ABC news reporter-who-wasn’t, you would almost be sorry to see him go.

Silagy abruptly announced his resignation Jan. 25. His leave-taking comes after The Orlando Sentinel, the Florida Times-Union,

NPR, The Guardian, The Miami Herald and others revealed ties among FPL, Alabama consulting firm Matrix LLC and a web of dark money spending to aid GOP candidates in three state Senate races, undermine solar power and much, much more.

Our personal favorite? Hiring a private investigator to follow a reporter critical of FPL. “Boring!” moaned a Matrix employee after the reporter failed to drive drunk after a wedding.

Matrix and its alleged dark money operatives fiddling in Florida elections, not FPL, are at the heart of a campaign finance violation complaint filed with the Federal Elections Commission by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, an advocacy group.

But FPL’s money, and Silagy’s role in distributing it, run through a cache of internal Matrix documents.

We don’t know if Silagy regrets any or all of it. We don’t know if the FEC will ever-so-slightly shift its bureaucratic bulk to weigh in or simply shrug: Another day, another dark money scandal.

It could take a year or more before we find out.

So long as it’s waiting, NextEra Energy, FPL’s parent company, might use that time to write apology notes. It can start with innocent bystanders, including every Theodore Hayes, everywhere. According to reports, Silagy sometimes used an email alias of Theodore Hayes when communicating with Matrix.

Well, sure. If your goal is, as one Matrix memo suggested, to “minimize all public reporting” of FPL campaign activity, then a fake ID is a swell idea.

But consider the Miami cook Theodore Hayes and the Baltimore broadcaster Theo Hayes; the Theodore Hayeses everywhere whose answering machines suddenly filled up with complaints about utility bills.

Some took it better than others. One such “Theodore Hayes,” after stating he is not Eric Silagy on his LinkedIn page, added: “I steal elections and all your money.”

Apologies to all.

Toby Overdorf could use a “sorry” too. In 2018, an ABC news producer confronted Florida

House of Representatives candidate Toby Overdorf about 20 dead gopher tortoises at a construction site where he served as a wildlife consultant. The video story that followed showed a flustered Overdorf with no explanation.

This, in all likelihood, was because there were no gopher tortoises, a city investigation found. Not dead. Or alive.

But then, there was also no ABC journalist. The woman did freelance work for the network but wasn’t there for the nightly news. According to NPR and Floodlight, the woman was on the payroll of Matrix. And Matrix had noted payments to her “for Florida Crystals, FPL.”

For what Matrix financial documents indicate was FPL’s partial support for making political props of innocent gopher tortoises, a threatened species with enough problems on its plate, a partial apology would be acceptable.

Apologies, too, to anyone holding a share of NextEra stock on Jan. 24. On Jan. 25, Securities and Exchange Commission filings made public Silagy’s resignation and NextEra’s conclusion that no campaign finance laws had been broken. Everything was going to be fine, just fine, the company said in a conference call.

But Wall Street’s gotta Wall Street, and share price plunged 11% in 10 days. Between Jan. 24, the day before the SEC filings hit the fan, and Jan. 26, a person holding 1,000 shares of NextEra lost more than $7,000 in market equity. Sorry!

NextEra has emphasized it is filing a robust response to the FEC complaint. It refutes the idea it ran afoul of campaign laws. It indicated Silagy’s departure had nothing to do with the news reports.

Even if there was a problem, the total campaign contributions at issue totaled less than $1.3 million, the company told analysts. “We do not expect that allegations of federal campaign finance law violations taken as a whole would be material to us.”

But it has already made a material difference.

It has damped goodwill created by memories of those mile-long lines of utility trucks coming to turn the lights back on after a hurricane. Among responsible reporters, it has cast shade on the company’s credibility. It has given groups opposing FPL policies more ammunition for their fight.

In other words: Just desserts.