A former BP PLC senior engineer was found guilty Wednesday of destroying evidence sought by the U.S. in an investigation of the 2010 Gulf of Mexico well explosion and oil spill.
A federal jury in New Orleans convicted the engineer, Kurt Mix, of one of two counts of obstruction of justice. Prosecutors said Mix deleted text messages and voice-mail messages from his mobile phone related to BP’s effort to estimate the size of what turned out to be largest U.S. offshore oil spill.
Mix, who was involved in leading the efforts to cap the Macondo well as crude gushed into the Gulf of Mexico, denied intentionally destroying evidence. His lawyer Joan McPhee asked U.S. District Judge Stanwood Duval Jr. to throw out the guilty verdict. Duval deferred ruling on that motion. He released Mix on bond and set sentencing for March 26. Mix faces a maximum of 20 years in prison and a $250,000 fine.
The blowout of BP’s Macondo well in deep water off the coast of Louisiana in April 2010 killed 11 people. BP agreed last year to pay $4 billion to resolve the federal criminal inquiry of its role in the spill.
The London-based company pleaded guilty to 14 criminal counts including 11 for felony manslaughter, one misdemeanor under the Clean Water Act, one misdemeanor under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act and one felony count of obstruction of Congress for misrepresenting the size of the spill.
“Today, a jury in New Orleans found that Kurt Mix purposefully obstructed the efforts of law enforcement during the investigation of the largest environmental disaster in U.S. history,” Mythili Raman, acting assistant U.S. attorney general, said in a statement after the verdict.
Mix, the first defendant in a criminal case over the spill to face a jury, was accused of deleting multiple messages, including one in which he said the spill was bigger than BP said it was. His trial began Dec. 2. Jury deliberations began Monday.
He was found guilty of deleting messages in October 2010 involving communications with his supervisor, Jonathan Sprague. He was acquitted on an obstruction of justice charge in the government’s claim that he deleted communications in August 2011 involving exchanges with Sprague and a contractor. Defense lawyers contended there was no evidence that Mix acted with corrupt intent on either occasion.
“It sounds like the jury reached a compromise,” said David Uhlmann, a professor at the University of Michigan Law School in Ann Arbor and former head of the environmental crimes section of the U.S. Justice Department. “There is no excuse for destroying evidence during a criminal investigation but deleting text messages hardly qualifies as the worst misconduct in the gulf oil spill,” Uhlmann said in an email.
Mix was involved in leading BP’s efforts to cap the well, including a procedure called Top Kill, the U.S. said in court papers. Mix, who had access to internal company data on the amount of oil flowing into the Gulf, knew that BP’s internal estimates of the flow rate were “well above” the numbers the company was citing publicly and higher than the maximum 15,000 barrel-a-day limit for Top Kill to succeed, the U.S. said.
Mix didn’t disclose this at a meeting of government officials and BP engineers in May 2010 and subsequently erased references to it on his iPhone, prosecutors said.
He sent a text message to a supervisor on May 26, 2010, saying that the flow rate was too high for Top Kill to work, FBI Special Agent Barbara O’Donnell said in a sworn statement filed in the case.
“Too much flow rate - over 15,000 and too large an orifice,” Mix said, according to the U.S. He later deleted this text, O’Donnell said. The U.S. was able to recover most of the texts, including this one, using “forensic tools,” she said in an April 2012 filing.
Business, Pages 26 on 12/19/2013