BP, supervisors face manslaughter charges; firm to pay $4 billion settlement in Gulf oil spill
Attorney General Eric Holder said that federal grand juries had also indicted the two highest- ranking BP supervisors on the Deepwater Horizon rig with 23 counts of criminal wrongdoing, including manslaughter. Holder also announced the indictment of BP's incident commander with lying to and hiding information from Congress.
Earlier in the day, BP agreed to a criminal plea and will pay $4 billion over five years in a settlement with the Justice Department over the 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the company said Thursday.
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A source says oil giant BP has agreed to pay
the largest criminal penalty in U.S. history, totaling billions of
dollars, for the 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
While the technology required to drill — and
cap — an oil well in deep water can be mind-boggling, cleaning up the
spill required mostly tedious manual labor.
BP said it would increase its existing $38.1 billion charge against earnings for the spill by $3.85 billion.
The criminal settlement does not cover federal civil claims, including Clean Water Act claims, federal and state claims of damages to natural resources or private civil claims. Settling those would probably cost BP billions of dollars more, and the company said it is “prepared to vigorously defend itself against remaining civil claims.”
But it would resolve a variety of criminal charges. BP agreed to plead guilty to 11 felony counts of misconduct or neglect of ships’ officers relating to the loss of 11 lives on the drilling rig that caught fire and sank; one misdemeanor count under the Clean Water Act; one misdemeanor count under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act; and one felony count of obstruction of Congress. BP said that the last of those is related to misreporting to a member of Congress the rate at which oil was gushing into the gulf.
The settlement is subject to U.S. federal court approval. MORE
