Local Ricci-pinching maxima on an almost-abelian group

Lauret's July 2018 talk announced nonglobal local maxima of the Ricci pinching functional that are not solvsolitons of the specified transitive group. This research note gives a self-contained small-parameter proof for the known Lauret-Will family A_u = J direct-sum uE_12. For each u strictly between zero and one half, its standard metric is a non-strict local maximum of Scal^2/||Ric||^2, with value 1/3, among all nearby left-invariant metrics on the fixed five-dimensional simply connected solvable group. It fails that group's equation Ric = cI + D for a derivation D, and a same-group metric has value 9/17. This gives an explicit negative answer to the literal fixed-group assertion in Morgan-Pansu Question 14. The proof covers the full space of nearby metrics through an orthogonal slice with an unrestricted cross-block and a uniform remainder estimate along a constant-value family. The metric is nevertheless a geometric Ricci soliton, isometric to the product of the Euclidean plane and the three-dimensional Heisenberg group. The earlier exact existence announcement and known family/value are credited. No novelty, first assertion, first proof, or present community-open status is claimed. Source-context statements refer to the actually inspected arXiv versions, rather than inaccessible final journal full texts. The deposit contains the six-page research note, its standalone LaTeX source and build instructions, and an independently reproducible verification package with exact symbolic and rational curvature checks, preserved original inputs, mandatory checks in normal and optimized Python, integrity manifests, and qualified priority-review materials. AI tools were used extensively in solving, symbolic computation, source review, writing and adversarial verification. This work is unrefereed and has not received external human peer review.