05/10/2010 // West Palm Beach, FL, USA // Tara Monks // Tara Monks
New Orleans, LA – A BP shareholder filed a lawsuit Friday, May 7, 2010, against the company’s top executives, claiming the chief executive officer and other executives ignored safety issues on rigs, as reported by The Seattle Times.
The lawsuit was filed in federal court by Katherine Firpo of Pennsylvania. She has accused the firm of enlisting cost-cutting measures that overlook safety and lobbying government authorities to decrease safety regulations. The lawsuit claims the rig accident that occurred on April 20, 2010 will cost London-based British Petroleum tens of billions of dollars.
The suit is known as a “shareholder derivative” suit, which means it was filed by a shareholder on the company’s behalf.
The lawsuit seeks court-ordered changes in the organization’s corporate governance along with an order that the executives pay monetary damages.
Firpo’s suit follows a 2006 suit that claimed much of the same. The previous suit was settled out of court and, according to Firpo’s documents, resulted in the firm making “purely cosmetic changes at the corporate level.”
The suit says, “The BP Defendants have a long history of ignoring crucial safety issues related to the operation of offshore submersible rigs such as the Deepwater Horizon rig, including problems with the crucial blowout preventer devices that so spectacularly failed during this disaster.”
The lawsuit also names three other companies as defendants:
Transocean Ltd. is the rig’s owner-operator. Cameron International Corp. is the manufacturer of the blowout preventer that failed. Halliburton Energy Services, Inc. is the firm that was attempting to cap the well with cement prior to the explosion.
A BP spokesman declined comment when asked about the lawsuit.
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