BP oil refinery should be fined more
February 19, 2008
On February 18th, the attorneys representing the people who were victims of the BP Texas City oil refinery explosion in the year 2005 argued that the oil company got away with a very small fine. They claim that the company must be actually giving billions instead of the meager $50 million it has proposed in a plea agreement. The estimate, the attorneys feel the company could be fined, for the hardships the victims of the explosion had to suffer is $3.2 billion.
They however said that the fine should never have been just $50 million but at least $400 million. The fines that were proposed were incorporated in the court documents that were filed by the victim’s lawyers in the week before. This was done on the request of a federal judge who is currently contemplating on whether or not to agree to a plea deal from the BP oil giant.
The current agreement has in it the provisions which propose that the BP oil refinery plead guilty for the violation of the Clean Air Act. It also says that the company will have to pay $50 million as a fine for the criminal manner of the explosion. The explosion had taken the lives of 15 people and had caused injury to more than 170 people. The agreement also says that the company would also be in probation for the next three years.
Earlier this month the plant manager of the oil refinery, Keith Casey, had formally registered the guilty plea as a representative of the entire company. The guilty plea that was made was in accordance with the agreement BP had come in the month of October last year where they had said that they will pay $373 million as a settlement fees. The fee was to settle the various civil and criminal charges that were piled up against them.
However the attorneys who are representing the victims has now asked the U.S. District Judge Lee Rosenthal to rebuff this deal saying that the compensation fee that was imposed on the oil giant was too low. They also claim that the deal which they had come to did not take care of the need for an autonomous monitor who would be able to report whether the company was taking enough measures to meet the safety obligations. The attorneys were also of the opinion that the prosecutors had not consulted the victims while the deal was being formulated.
The BP oil refinery and the prosecutors were, however, of the view that the deal was the harshest punishment they could get and hence were defending the deal. They feel that the procedure that was undertaken was the harshest there was in analyzing the criminal nature of the explosion. BP also said that the company has already paid in excess of $1.6 billion as compensation to more than 2000 victims after the unfortunate incident took place. They say that they have settled almost half of the 4000 lawsuits that were filed after the explosion.