谢谢你给了我温暖:BP spilled money all over gulf - Odds & Tidbi...

BP spilled money all over gulf

BP.jpg (20.14 KB)
2011-4-16 13:28
A hard hat from an oil worker lies in oil from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill on East Grand Terre Island, Louisiana, June 8, 2010.


A MILLION dollars a month to rent a sleepy marina on the bayou? $US15,000 a month to operate a single generator? $US35,000 for a brand new 4x4 for the mayor of Biloxi?


BP paid it all. As the oil rolled in, the cash flowed out in a deluge of reimbursements and compensation payments that have muted protest from the real victims of last year's gigantic Gulf Coast oil spill, but made "spillionaires" of an unscrupulous few who seized control of much of the money and funnelled it to those they knew.


A detailed review of "emergency" spending by one New Orleans parish has revealed that BP money was used to pay $US1.1 million a month for temporary headquarters -- space normally leased for $US1700 a month.


St Bernard Parish, southeast of New Orleans, also spent $US15,000 a boat a day on fleets of fishing smacks usually hired for one-sixth that amount, yielding a profit of $US250,000 a day for one subcontractor for several months.


"This parish raped BP," Wayne Landry, the chairman of the St Bernard Parish council, told ProPublica, a non-profit investigative journalism group. "It just really frustrates me. I'm an elected official. I have guilt by association."


In Lafourche Parish, west of New Orleans, the parish president used BP cash to buy herself an iPad six weeks after the well was capped. In St John the Baptist Parish, one company with no experience of oil clean-up operations won contracts worth $US125m. Some of the money went to a subcontractor, who charged up to six times the normal rate for his services, including $US14,000 to set up and start a single diesel generator.


Details of the apparent misuse of BP funds emerged as shareholders gathered for the company's annual general meeting in London. Some allegations have been reported to the FBI, but most will go uninvestigated because the company released the money with few strings attached.


Louisiana also released $US10m from the company to Buddy Caldwell, its state Attorney-General, to fund a series of lawsuits he is bringing against BP. Mr Caldwell is an elected official who has hired seven private law firms to help with the litigation. Five of them have contributed heavily to his campaigns in recent years.


For crabbers, as for lawyers, it has been nice work if you can get it, and in St Bernard Parish the key to getting it -- according to aggrieved locals -- has been knowing Craig Taffaro, the parish president.


One St Bernard resident who took home $US67,000 in 2009 from catching crabs and hunting swamp rats more than trebled his earnings last year, with the help of a $US100,000 payment from BP and $US90,000 earned through having been hired by Mr Taffaro to help with the clean-up. Soon after the Deepwater Horizon rig blew up, Mr Taffaro exercised his right to declare a 30-day emergency in the parish, during which he was allowed to hire contractors without competitive tendering.


Most of the BP funds destined for the St Bernard Parish clean-up were funnelled, at Mr Taffaro's insistence, through the family-owned Loupe Construction and Consulting firm, according to ProPublica, despite a claim by Mr Landry, the chairman of the parish council, the firm had "no particular expertise in oil mitigation".


The deal to lease waterfront land to BP for its temporary headquarters was won by Amigo Enterprises, co-owned by the sheriff of St Bernard Parish. The land, rented from a charity for $US1700 a month, was leased to BP for 647 times as much.


The Times