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BP and Three Executives Facing Criminal Charges Over Oil Spill
New submitter SleazyRidr writes "Finally some news that will please a lot of the Slashdot crowd: a company has been charged with manslaughter! BP has been charged with manslaughter following the Macondo Incident. 'BP has agreed to pay $4.5 billion to settle the criminal charges and related Securities and Exchange Commission charges.' Two of the rig supervisors and a BP executive are also facing jail time. The supervisors are charged with 'failing to alert on-shore managers at the time they observed clear signs that the Macondo well was not secure and that oil and gas were flowing into the well,' and the supervisor is charged with 'obstruction of Congress and making false statements to law enforcement officials about the amount of oil flowing from the well.' Is this the start of companies being forced to take responsibility for their actions?"
Who knew that could ever come back and bite them in the ass?
You can settle criminal charges with a load of cash? That doesn't seem right to me.
What doesn't kill you only delays the inevitable
A judge also may set bond conditions and other restrictions on the defendants, but the workers don't face arrest ahead of time, their lawyers said.
Not your typical criminal manslaughter treatment.
When "BP" has to spend 180 days in prison like a regular person convicted of manslaughter then I'll believe it.
Oh, and I'd want BP to be a registered felon, so no government jobs/contracts, no leaving the country and no crossing state lines without the court's okay.
Yeah, right.
The larger damage was not to manslaughter but to destroying a complete ecosystem - Privatizing profits and socializing losses in action. Companies trifle with natural resources because they know if it all fails, we will have to pull together to get out of it.
On the same note, why can people put a price on a pirated mp3, but not on a long-term damaged ecosystem?
NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.
"...take responsibility for their actions?"
No. This is just to appeal to environmentalists and the general populace, and will be a very rare occurrence. I verily doubt you'll see a single company in the next 10 years being forced to "take responsibility."
It's escape goats, dude.
The ecosystem is not destroyed. The oil that entered the water is organic and constantly enters the oceans naturally. BP's negligence caused it to enter far more rapidly than the ecosystem could handle. This resulted in great immediate harm to sea life, but not permanent.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Why can't we hold the financial industry accountable and start putting bankers in Federal pound-me-in-the-ass prisons?
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
A few states, such as Australia and the UK have such a thing as corporate manslaughter. Not every murderer acts on his own initiative, sometimes he has his employer's interests at heart. UK version
But, people being held responsible nonetheless. The next time an edict comes down the "pipe" to start drilling without proper precautions, the folks on point are more likely to CYA and either get official clearance from above (absolving them of blame) or just outright refuse to follow orders.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
With over $150 Billion in equity* it's a laughable settlement considering the gross negligence BP should be cited for.
[*] - http://www.bp.com/extendedsectiongenericarticle.do?categoryId=9021229&contentId=7039276
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They should have followed ConocoPhillips and their plans in China. Not only will they not face criminal charges, the government decided not to let the state controlled media report on it until it slipped out via a blog. Darn it! If only the government could control everything, we wouldn't have to worry about everyone else finding out about a little 320 square mile oil spill.
My work here is dung.
Has Rep. Joe Barton apologized to BP for this yet?
Does this mean rich people can just kill the poor and pay fines now?
Taking a life illegally should at least warrant some jail time.
This presumes that board members, major investors, and the CEO were both aware of, and actively refusing to do something about safety and environmental concerns.
In a company the size of BP, it's flatly unreasonable to expect that the board & CEO will be aware of every minor decision and safety concern anywhere in the company the moment it is raised. Now, if there is evidence that those people were negligent in responding to, addressing, or correcting issues that they were clearly informed of, then you'd have a good argument for "jail terms" for these people. Without it, the blame rests with the people who FAILED to raise those safety concerns, or ignored those safety concerns, when it was their job to care about and address them - i.e., the supervisors, and the executive being charged.
This "string up the board" argument is as stupid as it is misguided. It plays well to the idiotic "Occupy Wall Street" crowd; thankfully it doesn't play as well to an educated judiciary.
The more important and related story is that due to this, the EPA has suspended BP from any further contracts with the Federal government.
http://blog.chron.com/lorensteffy/2012/11/in-suspending-bp-epa-does-what-drilling-regulators-would-not/
I'm sure it will not be long before BP is crying about unions and regulation and it being too expensive to do business in America.
That's nice. So go right ahead and take up that manslaughter hobby you've always dreamed of! After all it was only what, 11 people killed? so $4.5 billion divided by 11: that means you can murder anybody you want for the low low price of only ~$409 million!. What are you waiting for!? ...I fucking hate this country.
This was falsified a long time ago. Natural seepage into the Gulf nowhere equals what was puking out of that damaged well. The ecosystem has not returned to normal, and with the added known of the dispersal chemicals, no one can actually say what is happening or how long it will take for the oil to be absorbed. But this belief that bacteria just magically eat oil and in turn leave behind no deleterious side effects is pretty much akin to claiming that women's reproductive systems magically expunge rapists' sperm.
But you would have made a great member of the group at the beginning of Thank Your Smoking; the oil company representative who insists that oil spills just get eaten up by the ecosystem, and even vaguely hints that ecosystems actually benefit from it.
Actually, what you're post reminds of is a great and sadly departed Seattle comedy show called Almost Live, where there was fantastic sketch featuring a pro-tobacco lobbyist who said bizarre things like "Three out of four chiropactors agree that not only does smoking not harm you, but in fact places a protective coating on the lungs!" You could have done the followup sketch; "Three out of four industry 'researchers' insist that only do oil spills not harm the environment, they in fact feed the bacteria and make the environment even better!"
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
And you know this how? No researcher I know is claiming it has been removed.
Sitting mixed with dispersants at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico is no "removed".
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
In 1991, the local Bhopal authorities charged Anderson, who had retired in 1986, with manslaughter, a crime that carries a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison. He was declared a fugitive from justice by the Chief Judicial Magistrate of Bhopal on 1 February 1992 for failing to appear at the court hearings in a culpable homicide case in which he was named the chief defendant. Orders were passed to the Government of India to press for an extradition from the United States. The U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal of the decision of the lower federal courts in October 1993, meaning that victims of the Bhopal disaster could not seek damages in a US cour
1. BP does not stand for British Petroleum and hasn't since the late 90s when American Oil Company and British Petroleum merged to format BP AMOCO. The merged company later changed the name to BP, not short for anything.
2. More BP stock is owned by US companies and individuals than British.
BP is multinational, the HQ of the parent company might be in London but it's owned by Americans.