Halliburton has signed a cooperation and guilty plea agreement with the government in which Halliburton has agreed to plead guilty and admit its criminal conduct. As part of the plea agreement, Halliburton has further agreed, subject to the court’s approval, to pay the maximum-available statutory fine, to be subject to three years of probation and to continue its cooperation in the government’s ongoing criminal investigation. Separately, Halliburton made a voluntary contribution of $55 million to the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation that was not conditioned on the court’s acceptance of its plea agreement.

Proving that even the largest corporations can't escape the long arm of the law, Halliburton is pleading guilty to a single misdemeanor charge of destroying evidence in the blowout of the Macondo deepwater oil well that spilled more than five million barrels of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico in 2010. In a press release from the the U.S. Department of Justice:The amount of that fine? $200,000. In the second quarter of 2013, the oilfield products and services giant, the world's largest supplier of hydraulic fracking services, earned profits of $679 million. Conditions of Halliburton's probation were not announced.

Steve Mufson reports:



[H]alliburton said that on two occasions during the oil spill, it directed employees to destroy or “get rid of” simulations that would have helped clarify how to assign blame for the blowout—and possibly focused more attention on Halliburton’s role. [...] The admission is likely to complicate Halliburton’s efforts to avoid damage payments in civil suits linked to the Deepwater Horizon spill. During the first quarter of this year, the company took a $637 million charge against earnings to increase to about $1.3 billion a reserve set aside for possible Macondo settlement costs.

The destruction of evidence had to do with Halliburton's recommendations to BP, the Macondo well's owner, to use 21 instead of 6 stabilizing collars. Halliburton noted repeatedly to investigators of the spill that BP ignored its advice and that may have been a major factor in the disaster. But Halliburton ordered employees to destroy documentation of two of its simulations that indicated little difference between using 6 or 21 collars. What made the difference, according to investigators, was the cementing.

You can read more about Halliburton's criminal behavior and its "punishment" below the fold.