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
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.
