Hayward told BP employees who attended a town hall type meeting in December 2006 that BP has "a leadership style that is too directive and doesn't listen sufficiently well. The top of the organisation doesn't listen sufficiently to what the bottom is saying."
Those comments led Steward to conclude that the changes at BP "did not come about because they were being good corporate citizens, it was because they were already felons and had recently killed a bunch of people."
Steward also attached a 12-page memo to her from Dean Ingemansen, the EPA's criminal enforcement attorney, of the proposed fines that could be levied against BP Exploration Alaska for the week-long oil spill as well as another spill that occurred five months later, which also resulted from a corroded pipeline.
Ingemansen concluded, based on his review of case
law, sentencing decisions and "guidance documents" from the EPA and the
DOJ's Environmental Crimes Manual, that BP could be penalized as much as
$672 million for the March and August 2006 oil spills or as little as
$58 million, "incredibly low settlements" as far as West was concerned.
Blunted
West said he knew he still had quite a bit of work to do. Although his probe had crossed the one year mark, he didn't have enough evidence to recommend felony charges against BP or senior executives.
"These are complex investigations," West said. "It usually takes a minimum of three to five years."
He said as much during a meeting of investigators and prosecutors in Anchorage on August 28, 2007, to discuss the case. And, West said, he was told that if he did not have enough evidence to allow prosecutors to file immediate felony charges against BP or executives at the company than the government was no longer interested in pursuing the case.
Federal prosecutors "asked me what I thought we could charge BP at that very moment and I said a criminal misdemeanor for Clean Water Act violations," West said. "And they said 'OK, then a misdemeanor it is.' I'm screaming bloody murder! I told them I'm hot on the trail. Don't kill this investigation now! It would be different if I were working this case for six years and spent a lot of time and resources on it. But it was only 17 months."
DOJ attorneys in Alaska decided the best course of action was to settle the case then and there. West said he continued to argue against the "rush to settle" and explained that he still had a large volume of evidence he hadn't yet reviewed. He said he needed at least another year.
"They said flatly 'no,'" West said. He then asked for six months and again was rebuffed.
"How about three more months?"
"No," he was told. "It's over."
West said he was pulled aside at the end of the meeting by Karen Loeffler, the chief of the criminal division of the US attorney's office in Alaska.
"She told me that she was just following orders and that the decision to close the case and settle was made by Ron Tenpas," the assistant attorney general for Environment and Natural Resources at Main Justice, who was appointed to that position earlier in the year.
Tenpas, now in private practice at the law firm Morgan Lewis in Washington, DC, did not return calls or emails seeking comment. Loeffler also did not respond to requests for comment. Loeffler had previously denied that she told West that Tenpas shut down the probe. Tenpas had said in November 2008 that, while he agreed with the decision to settle, the decision to do so was not his.
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