Halliburton Employee Gets Probation For Destroying Gulf Oil Spill Documents

Editor's note: See, the Probate Court of Cook County does not have a monopoly on destroying documents!  Lucius Verenus, Schoolmaster, ProbateSharks.com

 

Halliburton Employee Gets Probation For Destroying Gulf Oil Spill Documents

Date posted: January 24, 2014 | Posted in eDiscovery, Spoliation | 0 comments

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Just a couple of months ago, we wrote about how Halliburton had been spared from some enormous fines by virtue of having a defensible legal hold policy. As you may recall, the energy company was, along with BP and Transocean, facing some very serious charges in the investigation of the Deepwater Horizon spill. There was the suspicion that Halliburton had known that the cement work on the oil rig may have been inadequate, and that this evidence had been intentionally deleted, but again, its legal hold policy was deemed worthy, and so the company was “only” fined $200,000, while BP and Transocean were hit with sanctions of $4 billion and $400 million respectively.

Anyway, while Halliburton the company may have made it out relatively cheaply, one of its employees was still on the hook. Back in October, cementing technology director Anthony Badalamenti pleaded guilty to destroying aforementioned evidence. As the USA Today wrote at the time:

Anthony Badalamenti, 62, faces a maximum sentence of 1 year in prison and a $100,000 fine after his guilty plea in U.S. District Court to one misdemeanor count of destruction of evidence…
In May 2010, according to prosecutors, Badalamenti directed a senior program manager to run computer simulations on centralizers, which are used to keep the casing centered in the wellbore. The results indicated there was little difference between using six or 21 centralizers.
The data could have supported BP’s decision to use the lower number, but Justice Department prosecutor William Pericak said the number of centralizers had “little effect” on the outcome of the simulations.
Badalamenti instructed the program manager to delete the results. The program manager “felt uncomfortable” about the instruction but complied, according to prosecutors.

Badalamenti received his sentence this past week. Remember, the maximum sentence he could’ve faced was “1 year in prison and a $100,000 fine.” So what did he end up with?

US district judge Jay Zainey sentenced Badalamenti to perform 100 hours of community service and ordered him to pay a $1,000 fine on top of the year’s probation. “I still feel that you’re a very honorable man,” he told Badalamenti. “I have no doubt that you’ve learned from this mistake.”

As Tulsa World points out, Badalamenti is not the only individual facing spoliation-related charges as a result of the spill:

On Dec. 18, a jury convicted former BP drilling engineer Kurt Mix of trying to obstruct a federal probe of the spill. Prosecutors said Mix was trying to destroy evidence when he deleted a string of text messages to and from a BP supervisor.

Mix faces a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison and a $250,000 fine. His sentencing is set for March 26.

This is as high-profile a spoliation case as we’ve seen in a while, and it ought to let a broad audience know that document deletion is no joke, and that the sanctions can be severe.