Sales of shares and stocks in days and weeks beforehand
Halliburton link, acquisition of cleanup company days before explosion
BP report cites undocumented tampering with well sealing equipment
Government uses disaster to push for Carbon Tax, Nationalization talk
On April 12, just over one week before the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded, Halliburton, the world’s second largest oilfield services corporation, surprised some by acquiring Boots & Coots, a relatively small but vastly experienced oil well control company.
The company deals with fires and blowouts on oil rigs and oil wells. It was responsible for putting out roughly one third of the more than 700 oil well fires set in Kuwait by retreating Iraqi soldiers during the Gulf War.
The deal itself is still under scrutiny with Boots and Coots facing an ongoing investigation into “possible breaches of fiduciary duty and other violations of state law”
Where this information gets really interesting is with the fact that Halliburton is named in the majority of some two dozen lawsuits filed since the explosion by Gulf Coast people and businesses who claim that the company is to blame for the disaster.
Halliburton was forced to admit in testimony at a congressional hearing last month that it carried out a cementing operation 20 hours before the Gulf of Mexico rig went up in flames. The lawsuits claim that four Halliburton workers stationed on the rig improperly capped the well.
As the New York Times noted on May 26,
“BP officials chose, partly for financial reasons, to use a type of casing for the well that the company knew was the riskier of two options.
Workers from the rig and company officials have said that hours before the explosion, gases were leaking through the cement, which had been set in place by the oil services contractor, Halliburton. Investigators have said these leaks were the likely cause of the explosion.”
Another intriguing connection Boots and Coots has to the Deepwater Horizon explosion comes via Pat Campbell, the man BP has employed to cap the well beneath the ruined rig. Campbell worked for Boots and Coots as general manager for many years.
BP has admitted to buying Yahoo and Google keywords in an attempt to control publicly available information in the wake of the catastrophe. It seems that the company is taking all the flack for the spill while the Halliburton link is being roundly ignored.
BP’s prepared testimony briefing, which has since leaked online, also intriguingly notes that the Hydraulic Control System on equipment designed to automatically seal the well in an emergency was modified without their knowledge sometime before the explosion,
Goldman Sachs dumped 44% of its shares in BP Oil during the first quarter - shares that subsequently lost 36 percent of their value, equating to $96 million.
Other asset management firms also sold huge blocks of BP stock in the first quarter. Though the amounts pale in comparison to Goldman’s holdings, Wachovia, owned by Wells Fargo, sold 98% of its shares in BP and Swiss bank UBS sold 97% of its BP shares.
Furthermore, as reported by the London Telegraph on June 5, Tony Hayward, the chief executive of BP, sold £1.4 million of his shares in the fuel giant weeks before the spill.
In the days before the Deepwater explosion, Obama had announced a new effort to explore for and lease new drilling locations in the deep Gulf and in Alaska. In the wake of the disaster, these plans have been cancelled and BP is taking a PR bashing.
All of which has been capitalized on by the Obama administration to reinvigorate talk of a carbon tax and has created the opportunity to reintroduce the idea of nationalizing oil (below video), which the Democratic leadership has long sought.
The full story of what is happening in the Gulf of Mexico is yet to emerge, there are rumors of more spills and an ongoing cover-up.
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