Legal action

Charges, settlements, and penalties

A formal civil and criminal investigation into the spill was initiated in June 2010 by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ). In August 2010 Louisiana district court judge Carl Barbier was appointed to oversee the consolidated proceedings relating to the spill, which had prompted numerous lawsuits and precipitated a morass of complex legal entanglements, private and public. The DOJ sued BP, Transocean, and Anadarko, a minority owner of the well, in New Orleans civil court in December 2010 for violating the Clean Water Act and Oil Pollution Act.

In early March 2012 BP agreed to settle claims made by the plaintiffs’ steering committee, the consolidated representative body for many of the individual victims of the spill, for at least $7.8 billion. (The move followed the postponement of a trial scheduled in late February in Louisiana district court.) The monies were to be drawn from the compensation fund mandated by the Obama administration. Previously managed by lawyer Kenneth Feinberg—who had also overseen the compensation fund for victims of the September 11 attacks—the fund was transferred to court control as part of the accord. In addition to covering economic losses sustained in the wake of the spill, the settlement mandated the payment of medical claims (which had previously been denied by the fund) and provided for 21 years of further medical monitoring and care, allowing for the delayed onset of symptoms and illnesses. BP remained liable for substantial additional claims by local and state entities as well as by the federal government. An effort by the company to appeal the agreement, which received final approval in December 2012, was rejected by the U.S. Supreme Court in December 2014.

In November 2012 BP reached an agreement with the DOJ to plead guilty to 14 criminal charges, among them 11 counts of felony manslaughter, and violations of the Clean Water and Migratory Bird Treaty acts. The agreement carried penalties and fines amounting to more than $4.5 billion, of which nearly $1.26 billion would go to a discretionary fund overseen by the DOJ, some $2.4 billion to the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation (NFWF), and $350 million to the National Academy of Sciences (NAS). BP also agreed to pay more than half a billion dollars to the Securities and Exchange Commission for misleading its shareholders about the magnitude of the oil spill. The deal was approved in January 2013.

Later in November 2012, the EPA suspended BP from entering into any new federal contracts. That suspension, initially thought to be temporary, was reinforced in January 2013. In February the EPA also issued a separate suspension to the BP subsidiary that had operated the well, the Dallas-based BP Exploration & Production Inc., citing a violation of the Clean Water Act. In August 2013 the company filed suit against the EPA in Texas federal court, asking that the ban be lifted. It was not lifted until March 2014; the company successfully bid on 24 federal contracts later that month.

In January 2013 Transocean agreed to a $1 billion civil penalty under the Clean Water Act. Approximately $800 million of that amount was earmarked for restoration projects in the gulf, and the remainder was paid to the federal government. The company also pled guilty to criminal violations of the Clean Water Act, resulting in a $400 million criminal penalty. Of that money, $300 million was evenly divided between restoration projects administered by the NFWF and an offshore oil safety research endowment administered by the NAS. The remainder funded a liability trust to be drawn upon in the event of later spills. In May 2015 Transocean resolved claims made by the plaintiffs’ steering committee for some $211.7 million.

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In July 2013 Halliburton agreed to pay a $200,000 penalty after pleading guilty to criminal charges that its employees had destroyed evidence related to the spill. It settled claims with the plaintiffs’ steering committee for some $1.1 billion in September 2014. In November 2015 Anadarko was judged liable for some $159.5 million in civil penalties for its role in the disaster.

Charges against individuals

In April 2012 the first criminal charges to come out of the disaster were filed against a former senior drilling engineer for BP. Kurt Mix, who had worked for BP until January 2012, was charged in federal court with obstructing justice for deleting hundreds of text messages concerning the flow rate of oil despite having received legal notification to preserve the correspondence. Some of the messages were forensically recovered; one contained a flow rate estimate three times higher than what BP had publicly attested to at the time. He was convicted in December 2013.

In November 2012 two senior officers on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig, Robert Kaluza and Donald Vidrine, were charged with manslaughter. David Rainey, the former vice president for exploration in the Gulf of Mexico, was charged with obstructing Congress and making false statements to law enforcement concerning the rate at which oil was leaking from the rig. The Supreme Court refused to hear a 2015 appeal by the latter official to dismiss the obstruction charge.

To the dismay of many observers, none of the individuals who were charged with criminal offenses related to the spill ultimately received prison sentences. Rainey was acquitted in June 2015. Mix was granted a retrial owing to juror misconduct and instead pled guilty to misdemeanor computer fraud charges. He was sentenced to probation and community service in November 2015. The manslaughter charges against Kaluza and Vidrine were dropped in December 2015 at the request of the prosecution. Vidrine pled guilty to a misdemeanor charge of pollution under the Clean Water Act and in April 2016 was sentenced to probation, community service, and the payment of a fine. Kaluza pled not guilty to the same charge and was cleared in February 2016.

The civil trial

The civil trial of BP, Halliburton, and Transocean began in late February 2013 in New Orleans. The federal government, as well as individual states and entities, was among the plaintiffs. The trial was intended to determine liability under the Clean Water Act and Natural Resource Damage Assessments under the Oil Pollution Act, addressing charges not covered by previous settlement agreements. The proceedings were arranged in three phases. The first, which ended in April, was to assess the degrees to which the three companies were culpable. Of particular import was the distinction between “gross negligence” and “negligence”; the former designation would result in fines approximately four times higher than those assessed for the latter. The second phase of the trial, which began in late September, was intended to establish the volume of oil released by the spill and whether the preparedness and damage-control efforts of the involved parties were adequate. It ended in late October. The third phase, in which damages would be determined, finished in February 2015.

The ruling on the first phase, announced in September 2014, found BP to be 67 percent culpable for the spill and thus grossly negligent. Transocean was held 30 percent liable and Halliburton 3 percent liable; both companies were deemed negligent. The ruling on the second phase, announced in January 2015, set the legal amount of oil for which the involved parties would be liable at 3.19 million barrels. BP had claimed that approximately 2.45 million barrels had leaked, while the U.S. government contended that 4.19 million barrels had spewed into the gulf. In July 2015, in the wake of a rejected Supreme Court appeal regarding the maximum fines for the disaster, a tentative settlement was reached between BP, the federal government, and the five states affected by the spill, with BP estimating that it would cost the company $18.7 billion. A finalized settlement of $20.8 billion was announced in October 2015, bringing the third phase to a close. It was the largest financial penalty ever leveled by the U.S. government against a single company. However, some observers noted that a substantial portion of the settlement could be written off on the company’s taxes as a business expense and consequently questioned the severity of the punishment. The settlement was formally approved in April 2016.