General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: A massive manhunt and siege in West Texas now? [View all]Sgent
(5,858 posts)Two men who worked for BP during the 2010 Gulf oil spill disaster have been charged with manslaughter and a third with lying to federal investigators, according to indictments made public Thursday, hours after BP announced it was paying $4.5 billion in a settlement with the U.S. government over the disaster.
A federal indictment unsealed in New Orleans claims BP well site leaders Robert Kaluza and Donald Vidrine acted negligently in their supervision of key safety tests performed on the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig before the explosion killed 11 workers in April 2010.
The indictment says Kaluza and Vidrine failed to phone engineers onshore to alert them of problems in the drilling operation.Another indictment charges David Rainey, who was BP's vice president of exploration for the Gulf of Mexico, on charges of obstruction of Congress and false statements. The indictment claims the former executive lied to federal investigators when they asked him how he calculated a flow rate estimate for BP's blown-out well in the days after the April 2010 disaster.
Rainey's lawyer said his client did "absolutely nothing wrong." And attorneys for the two rig workers accused the Justice Department of making scapegoats out of them.
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The problem with the financial institutions is that they have to prove criminal intent to charge them with fraud. They have charged some of the lower level people, but intent is hard to prove if an executive has plausible deniability. Hence Sarbanes-Oxley which removes those requirements. Of course DU is fine with ex post facto laws when they damage people they don't like.