The oil services giant Halliburton agreed Thursday to plead guilty to destroying evidence during the Deepwater Horizon oil spill disaster in 2010, admitting to one count of criminal conduct and agreeing to pay the $200,000 maximum statutory fine, according to the Justice Department.Read the rest here.
In a startling turn in the three-year-old criminal investigation, Halliburton said that on two occasions during the oil spill, it directed employees to destroy or “get rid of” simulations that would have helped clarify how to assign blame for the blowout — and possibly focused more attention on Halliburton’s role.
Too big to fail and too big to jail.
5 comments:
$200,000 sounds like a fine for a baseball player.
I am having a hard time opposing the argument that when publicly traded companies get to be a certain size, they should be broken up.
Halliburton is essentially a state-sponsored company. They are one of the largest DOD contractors (if not THE largest) around, as such, hundreds of millions of dollars of their income is taxpayer money. This $200K is nothing, and is really nothing but a public fine which we are all forced to contribute to.
What type of government is it again in which a central government funds and largely controls private enterprises?
Zero Hedge calculated this to be 0.0007% of their expected annual revenue. It's the equivalent of a $35 fine for a person making $50,000/year. That's not even a speeding ticket in most places.
With a dinky fine like that why wouldn't they destroy evidence? That's basically the government encouraging them to do it!
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