BP to pay record $4 billion in damages for role in oil spill disaster
AP: BP will pay an unprecedented $4 billion in criminal penalties and plead guilty to manslaughter and other charges for its role in the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill disaster.
A US judge approved the agreement Tuesday. BP is pleading guilty to charges relating to the 11 workers’ deaths and for lying to Congress about the scale of the spill.
BP could pay billions more once the US federal government resolves its civil claims against the company.Photo: Sean Gardner/Reuters
So now we’ve got a slightly clearer impression of the terms of BP’s settlement over the Deepwater Horizon disaster – the company, in addition to the payout, will accept a guilty plea on manslaughter charges, accepting responsibility for the deaths of those 11 rig workers during the initial explosion.
Two BP Plc employees face criminal indictments for their part in the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster, and charges could be unveiled as early as Thursday, a source told Reuters on condition of anonymity.
London-based BP is expected to pay a record U.S. criminal penalty and plead guilty to criminal misconduct in the explosion and sinking of the Deepwater Horizon platform in the Gulf of Mexico, which caused the worst offshore oil spill in the country’s history, according to sources familiar with the matter.
The sources told Reuters that a plea deal with the Justice Department over the 2010 disaster, in which 11 workers died, may be announced as soon as Thursday.
READ ON: BP workers face criminal charges from 2010 spill - source
Will be interesting to see if anyone goes to jail over this.
I have been lucky. Having the opportunity to do something like this is fantastic. It is fair to say I wanted to recover some of my self-esteem.Tony Hayward, former CEO of BP • In a New York Times profile, examining the daily life of the former BP executive, just over two years after he famously lamented his loss of life. Hayward now finds himself at the helm of Genel Energy, a drastically smaller oil company (currently worth about $3 billion on London’s stock market), and he hopes to redeem his image globally. source (via • follow)
![U.S. DOJ files first round of criminal charges related to Gulf Oil Spill
Evidence reportedly destroyed by ex-BP employee: Former BP engineer Kurt Mix was arrested today, charged with two counts of obstruction of justice for allegedly destroying evidence requested by federal investigators. The charges are the first to be filed by the U.S. Department of Justice, related to the 2010 Gulf Oil Spill, but may not be the last according to Attorney General Eric Holder. Holder told reporters that the Deepwater Horizon Task Force will “[continue] its investigation into the explosion and will hold accountable those who violated the law.” If found guilty on both charges, Mix faces a maximum sentence of 40 years in prison and half a million dollars in fines. (Photo by SkyTruth) source
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Evidence reportedly destroyed by ex-BP employee: Former BP engineer Kurt Mix was arrested today, charged with two counts of obstruction of justice for allegedly destroying evidence requested by federal investigators. The charges are the first to be filed by the U.S. Department of Justice, related to the 2010 Gulf Oil Spill, but may not be the last according to Attorney General Eric Holder. Holder told reporters that the Deepwater Horizon Task Force will “[continue] its investigation into the explosion and will hold accountable those who violated the law.” If found guilty on both charges, Mix faces a maximum sentence of 40 years in prison and half a million dollars in fines. (Photo by SkyTruth) source
» But are the fines enough to teach BP a lesson? Some say no, including shrimp producer Dean Blanchard, who told The Guardian, “I want my day in court. If they can get off with just paying the money — well, they’ve got plenty of money, they are not really going to learn a lesson.” In addition to the settlement, BP announced that it would use the remainder of the $20 billion compensation fund it raised during the summer of 2010 to settle additional complaints from residents and businesses in the region. In a statement released late Friday night, BP chief executive Bob Dudley said, “the proposed settlement represents significant progress toward resolving issues from the Deepwater Horizon accident and contributing further to economic and environmental restoration efforts along the Gulf Coast.”
The oil spill examined: The first criminal charges to be filed against BP, regarding the explosion and subsequent oil leak at the Deepwater Horizon well, are being prepared by federal prosecutors. The charges, to come out next year, are expected to center on a group of engineers and whether false or misleading information about the safety of drilling at such deep depths in the Gulf of Mexico was submitted on federal documents. The spill in totality is very relevant right now — a couple months ago, the Obama administration approved BP for more drilling in the Gulf, despite no changes to spill-related financial liability laws. (Photo courtesy of ideum) source
A federal judge has ordered The Daily to take down exclusively obtained video clips of deposition testimony by former BP chief Tony Hayward. But The Daily is refusing to comply:
Judge Sally Shushan issued the order on Tuesday, saying the release of the video may be in violation of a pretrial order stating that no “part of the video or audio record of a video deposition shall be released or made available to any member of the public unless authorized by the court.”
Hayward gave three days of deposition testimony in a London law office last month as part of a federal lawsuit filed by several states and hundreds of plaintiffs against the oil giant for damages in last year’s Deepwater Horizon oil spill.
The Daily said in a statement yesterday: “We have not removed the clips … and have no intention of doing so until we’ve had the opportunity to present our case to the court.
“The Deepwater Horizon disaster is one of the worst environmental disasters in United States history and there is tremendous public interest in the complete disclosure of all of the surrounding facts.”
The Daily published the clips on Saturday on its app and website.
Stand by your guns, guys. Kudos.
oldmanyellsatcloud asked: So, I’ve got a concern that I’m hoping you guys can address. I’ve been helpfully directed here, not just by your own reports, but a few fellow news groups. Heres the chunk of my concern, here. Now, I have actually found a nonblog/reblogging source, since posting that, but it wasn’t well cited or documented. I was hoping maybe you folks have done a bit more digging since then. Since money and donations are traveling about, it’d be nice to get some feedback, due to the rather confusingly low level of converage… -even- in a mentality that adopts ‘BP lawsuits’ or ‘government gags’.
» We say: First off, I’d like to point out a couple of things in your responses. Jennifer has kept pretty open about her whole situation and is also on Twitter and Tumblr, so if you had any questions, you could easily ask her questions. I’m sure she would answer them. Also, have you watched the videos — like, more than one of them? They’re not exactly the easiest things in the world to watch. In a few of them, she’s on the phone for a full half-hour. No edits. Raw as you can get. Why would a scammer go to that much trouble to show us an entire half-hour of phone calls in excruciating detail? By the way, in case you were wondering, the organization she mentions, P2S, is real and actually did help with the cleanup.
The first mention I’ve seen about Jennifer’s condition online was way back in December — in a comment on a local news site where she noted she didn’t want to show pictures of her situation because she was trying to get her situation settled. (It’s confirmed via her Facebook profile.) Beyond the al-Jazeera report, she recently linked to a news story from a German television network that actually reported out of Panama City. The footage shows Rexford with dozens of bottles of pills. She’s about two-thirds of the way through the video. (Note: It’s in German, though the interviews are in English with German dubbing.)
Ultimately, here’s our feeling: If you’re wondering why the local news hasn’t covered Jennifer’s plight, why don’t you ask them? Clearly, she’s trying to get some media attention for her story. We’ll even help. We spent a week screaming from the mountaintops about this story. And we want more people to know about it.
BP managers presiding over 2010’s devastating gulf oil spill may not be getting off as scot-free as the public once perceived.
According to a Bloomberg report citing anonymous sources, federal prosecutors are considering charging BP managers with involuntary manslaughter or seaman’s manslaughter charges (a “more serious penalty of up to 10 years”) for sacrificing safety for speed prior to the oil rig accident that killed 11 workers last year. Investigators are also combing through the Congressional testimony of the gaffe-prone former BP CEO Tony Hayward and other industry executives “to determine whether their testimony was at odds with what they knew.”
Read more at The Atlantic Wire
Next question: What happens to the employers behind the cleanup effort? You know, the ones that led to stories like this?
Watch: PCB gets a visual shout out on GMA’s Yahoo/Tumblr...
Wrote a thing.
Hat tip to this headline writer.
Congrats Tumblr!
Don’t screw this up Yahoo.
In 2007, I was...
I started tumblr when I was at one of the lowest points of...
This is very disturbing, and very unreported: Have you heard about the plight of Jennifer Rexford? The Gulf resident and BP cleanup worker has been documenting on YouTube and Twitter the health issues she and others have faced in the wake of the Gulf Oil Spill. She’s having trouble getting any sort of financial help. Plus, she says she’s not alone, and that others are in the same situation as she is. Very disturbing. Very eye-opening. Also worth watching? The story of Paul Doom, a twentysomething Florida resident who was planning on going into the Marines, but instead became paralyzed after swimming in the Gulf of Mexico. The two have only gotten limited press coverage. What’s going on? We want some answers. Not just studies. (Thank you definitelynotcanon – sincerely! This story needs our attention.) source
Update: We heard from Jennifer. She recommends you donate to the Climate Change Relocation Center of Seattle if you’d like to help with her personal situation. We threw up a post about it over here.
Hey, let’s not forget about this: A report compiled by risk management firm Det Norske Veritas on last year’s oil spill in the Gulf came out today. (They were hired by the federal government, not BP, by the way.) They claim that design flaws scuttled the blowout preventer; as the well lost control, the drill pipe bent and buckled, which blocked the shear rams. Shear rams are the means by which the blowout is supposed to be prevented, as they’d cut through the drill pipe to safeguard against the well’s pressure level. Sadly, these sort of industrial fail-safe systems don’t always work as well in reality as in theory. source
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