Furious Growth and Cost Cuts Led To BP Accidents Past and Present - ProPublica

For 12 years, Pascal had wrestled with whether BP’s pattern of misconduct should disqualify it from receiving billions of dollars in government contracts and other benefits. Federal law empowers government officials to “debar”—ban from government business—companies that commit fraud or break the law too many times.

At first, Pascal thought BP would be another routine assignment. Over the years she’d persuaded hundreds of troubled energy, mining and waste-disposal companies to quickly change their behavior. But BP was in its own league. On her watch she would see BP charged with four federal crimes—more than any other oil company in her experience—and demonstrate what she described as a pattern of disregard for regulations and for the EPA. By late 2009 she was warning the government and BP executives themselves that the company’s approach to safety and environmental issues made another disaster likely.

One of the hardest moments of my life with BP was in the first six months of 2004 when I realized that I had been managed, and that I had been so easily manageable. They lied. I had swallowed their line hook, line and sinker.”

Pascal remained convinced that an accident was inevitable. She shared her fears with the EPA’s Criminal Investigation Division but said she was told that until an accident occurred, there was nothing to investigate.

Pascal then took her material to the Department of Justice.

“I said I had documents which showed the pipelines were in bad shape and that sooner or later there was going to be some kind of a failure,” she said.

An agent from the Federal Bureau of Investigation traveled to the North Slope to poke around but found nothing that could be knitted into a prosecution. The federal government, Pascal was again told, didn’t have jurisdiction to interfere with oil and gas infrastructure unless a crime had been committed or an accident had already happened. In the meantime BP’s five-year probation period had run out, taking most of Pascal’s leverage with it.

“I explored that with all kinds of people and I couldn’t find a jurisdictional way in, other than to let it happen,” she said. “So we had to wait.”

“The worst problem is to be certified but not qualified, because that means the person did not meet the qualification standard but yet someone testified that they did,” Anderson said. “To me, that’s fraud and could be a criminal offense.”

Garde was also concerned about how Anderson was treated after he reported the problem. Instead of being praised for his vigilance, he suddenly had trouble finding another job.

“Marty became the subject of both overt and subtle retaliation by Acuren and BPXA personnel,” Garde wrote in a letter to BP’s general counsel. “There is no question that there remains a high degree of hostility toward Marty by Acuren for ‘getting them in trouble.’ ”

“We failed to recognize we're an operating company. We had too many people that were working to save the world,” he continued, in a clear jab at Browne’s speeches on climate change.

Most famously, Hayward promised to turn the company around and to maintain a “laser-like focus” on safety. But it was unclear how he planned to do that.

In fact, soon after Hayward became CEO, BP’s Alaska division made a bold change that deemphasized safety and was a direct affront to Jeanne Pascal and the EPA: It removed the division’s Health, Safety and Environment director from a vice presidential position and dropped it several tiers down in the management hierarchy.

She said company executives acted confident—“arrogant”—as if they believed BP was so important that the U.S. government would never dare to debar it. “BP told me multiple times that they had direct access to the White House and they would go there.”

“It appears that BP, regardless of its code of conduct and statements to the government, will do whatever is necessary to cover up the improper actions of its senior managers,” she and Hodges, her junior co-counsel, wrote in an e-mail to Lynch and BP Alaska’s new president, John Minge, on January 19, 2010. “This promotes intimidation, retaliation, blackballing and unethical behavior in the management ranks, and a culture of fear and lack of ethics in the employee ranks.”

Pascal, for what it’s worth, has finally reached her decision.

“I have to conclude that BP has a corrupt culture, and had I arrived at that conclusion while I was handling the case I would have immediately debarred them,” she said last week. “I would have just let the chips fall where they may.”

What a great Lady! Pity no one was there to help her.

There are more videos on this.

http://our-manmade-disasters.blogspot.com/2010/11/coolections-of-videos-on-bps-slick.html

posted by Mike on http://www.propublica.org/article/bp-accidents-past-and-present/

BP used to be known as “Anglo Persian Petroleum”, and when developing petroleum resources in the middle east, was guilty of brutality, corruption, murder and corruption on such a grand scale that modern day Iranian hatred for the west remains one of the greatest problems we face.

BP emerges from the same european “sensibilities” that brought such gifts to humanity as colonialism, imperialism, terrorism, the African slave trade, world war, socialism and serial genocides.

The sooner BP is permanently and completely banished from the North American continent, the sooner we will be protected from vicious british animals who butcher human beings and despoil the environment without remorse.