Deepwater spill: has BP got away with it?
| 09:43 UK time, Thursday, 6 January 2011
, by a US presidential panel, has said failures of BP were "systemic" - and were likely to happen again unless there were reforms in the oil industry.
Perhaps most damningly, the chapter of the report detailing the circumstances of the actual explosion is headed with this quote from an internal BP email:
"But, who cares, it's done, end of story, [we] will probably be fine and we'll get a good cement job."
However, from BP's perspective, the key phrase in the report may be that the disaster was due to "multiple causes and multiple companies."
Certainly, it's what they have emphasised in their reaction to the report's findings.
BP's shares as a result of the report. So has BP got away with it?
The essence of the report is that BP's key fault was in its lack of "adequate controls" aimed at ensuring the engineering on the rig was "safe and sound."
There's certainly a sense from some that BP should be suffering more as a result of this, summed up by :
"The entire board and top management of BP should resign after presidential report on Gulf of Mexico oil spill."
Charlie Krenock of Greenpeace told 91Èȱ¬ News this morning that "at the last minute... they ignored their own recommendations," adding that "the real answer is to stop chasing every last drop of oil... chasing supply is going to continue to lead to problems."
But on , Thabale points out that:
"Time saving & cost cutting aren't always a bad thing, its just the manner in which they are done and its a good thing they 've acknowledge that other parties were also involved; at the end of the day, I would say BP deserved the share price rise."
And on the argues that the line that Deepwater Horizon was the biggest environmental disaster in history is "a hysterical Obama lie," and that the damage has largely disappeared. If that is the case, has enough already been done - and has BP been punished enough?
