Blundering BP knew about problem well

21st Jun 2010 11:34

It had looked like BP may have ridden out the worst of the backlash following the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, but its hapless boss has walked into a fresh row about his private life just as the company is accused of ignoring safety fears.Tony Hayward, having survived a meeting with US president Barack Obama and an 8-hour grilling by US politicians on Capitol Hill last week, rewarded himself with a day's sailing on his yacht off the Isle of Wight. Another PR blunder furious Americans call it.He's already public enemy number one on the other side of the pond after asking for his "life back" earlier in the crisis.Florida Democrat Kathy Castor thinks "it's time for heads to roll at BP". But a report from experts at Hargreaves Lansdown reckons Hayward will pocket a pension pot of £10.8m worth over £½m a year if he's toppled. Hardly a punishment.That's unlikely to endear the Englishman to the American public as a BBC Panorama investigation found a worker who claims to have spotted the fault on the failed blow-out preventer (BOP).Tyrone Benton, who worked on the Deepwater Horizon rig, says he told bosses about the problem weeks before the blast which killed 11 workers, but they just shut down the faulty 'pod' and switched to another. It wasn't fixed."Too many jobs were being done at one time. It should have just really slowed down and just took one job at a time, to make sure everything was done the way it should have been," Benton said.BP, paying around $500,000 (£335,000) a day to lease the rig from Transocean, has been accused of cutting corners after the project was overrunning by 40 days.This morning, the company said it had spent about $2bn (£1.4bn) on the spill so far, including $105m paid out to settle 32,000 out of a total 65,0000 compensation claims. On Friday, it managed to collect just over 11,000 barrels of oil from the broken well, still way less than the amount escaping into the sea. An internal memo puts the maximum theoretical flow rate at 60,000 barrels of oil a day, although the author accepts it "could be as high as 100,000 barrels per day". There's also the likelihood that BP will have to go through the courts to get partner Anadarko to pay its share of the clean-up costs. The US firm is so far refusing to contribute."BP's behaviour and actions likely represent gross negligence or wilful misconduct and thus affect the obligations of the parties under the operating agreement," it says.BP may try to raise $50bn (£34bn) to help shore up its finances if reports are to be believed. It agreed last week to put $20bn (£13.5bn) in an escrow account to "satisfy legitimate claims including natural resource damages and state and local response costs", but the final bill for the biggest environmental disaster in US history could easily top that and may not be known for many years.