BP has agreed to plead guilty to 14 criminal counts, including manslaughter, 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 and Justice Department announced Thursday.
Eat it, you incompetent, money-hungry, lying motherfuckers.
Yep...they'll write off most of it in less time it takes to pay the fine. This won't change anything.
However...throwing some of the cunts responsible in prison definitely WILL change things...at least for a while until they get their buddies in government to change the laws and get the settlement retroactively nullified....wherein BP sues the government for the money they spent on fines...and still keep the write offs on their bottom line....
....and then they'll ruin another Gulf Of Something in due time.
Yea, pretty much the problem with fines [regardless of how heavy they are] is that they are simply treated as yet another cost of doing business. If it is economically more profitable to fuck over the environment, people, whatever and then pay the fine, corporations will do it without blinking an eye. Never mind bullshit like ethics getting in the way.
Doombrain wrote:A drop in the ocean for BP, pun intended.
Yes indeed.
.......... including charges of seaman’s and involuntary manslaughter — against the two top-ranking BP supervisors on the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig where a blowout occurred April 20, 2010, sinking the rig and killing 11 workers.
I didn't realize there were so many deaths on that incident
Meh. Better than nothing, but mostly amounts to a slap on the wrist. If they truly made £16.3b in 2011 then $4b USD is fuck-all. I think they should be hung, drawn and quartered but maybe that's too radical.
They should lose their license to conduct offshore drilling operations in the U.S.. Since you can't trust them to maintain a level of safety, it makes sense to take away their ability to operate and make money.
If a doctor kills some of his patients, or an electrician's work sets fire to your house, a malpractice lawsuit would result in the person losing his license. I don't see why it's not the same here, oh right... because they are a corporation so it has all the same rights and protections of an individual but none of the responsibilities. That and BP has their dick in politician asses.
The blame is definitely shared, one could argue that it was an accident waiting to happen. Although that's probably why they are able to wipe out the court order like a footballer paying a parking fine.
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Aye no doubt and they foot a lot of the blame, but the regulation agencies should never of let that rig, along with a lot of other platforms in the gulf (and around the world) to continue operating. They knew BP had less than half the safety certificates required to allow the platform to function yet let it anyway, they also failed over a long period of time (atleast a decade) to update or enforce new procedures allowing big corporations to run the rigs how they please. This is not exactly a new accident either ?, it's just that this happened on Americas front door step with a lot of media coverage ?, It was an accident waiting to happen imo.
The sub contractors I think can be excluded from a lot blame though (I forget the company name, Haliburton and Transcoen ?), they skipped / failed to follow guidelines and carried out work they knew to be unsafe but apparently prior to the blow out, they warned BP engineers that they were doing it wrong and they chose to proceed anyway.
It's also worth noting that the regulators were the Minerals Management Service group/team or whatever, who also had the role of collecting the royalties from gas and oil drilling within federal borders.
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