One count of destruction of evidence was filed today in a U.S. District Court. DOJ: Halliburton pleading guilty

Halliburton Energy Services has agreed to plead guilty to one count of destroying evidence in connection with April 2010’s Deepwater Horizon disaster, the Justice Department announced Thursday.


The one count of destruction of evidence was filed today in the U.S. District Court in the Eastern District of Louisiana, according to the department.

The company has signed a guilty plea agreement with the government and agreed to admit criminal conduct, DOJ said. The plea deal includes penalties such as “the maximum-available statutory fine,” being subject to three years of probation and an agreement “to continue its cooperation in the government’s ongoing criminal investigation,” the department said.

The department didn’t specify the size of the fine and didn’t immediately respond to a request for information from POLITICO.

Halliburton later released a statement Thursday night specifying that a subsidiary at the company “has agreed to plead guilty to one misdemeanor violation associated with the deletion of records created after the Macondo well incident, to pay the statutory maximum fine of $200,000 and to accept a term of three years’ probation.”

In return, the Justice Department “has agreed that it will not pursue further criminal prosecution of the company or its subsidiaries for any conduct relating to or arising out of the Macondo well incident,” according to the company’s statement.

Halliburton separately has made a voluntary $55 million contribution to the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation “that was not conditioned on the court’s acceptance of its plea agreement,” according to the department.

The agreed-upon penalties are “subject to the court’s approval,” the department said.

Thursday’s news came eight months after BP agreed to pay $4.5 billion in fines — the largest such settlement in U.S. history — and plead guilty to a dozen felony counts in connection with the months-long spill, which fouled marshes and beaches across the northern Gulf Coast. However, the thicket of legal feuding continues, including BP’s efforts to challenge the handling of the court-supervised fund that is supposed to pay damages to those who suffered losses from the spill.

Halliburton’s one count of destroying evidence stems from an internal technical review that Halliburton performed on the design and construction of the Macondo well after the well ruptured in April 2010, causing a fire aboard the Deepwater Horizon rig that killed 11 workers and led to the biggest oil spill in U.S. history.

During that review, a senior program manager at Halliburton ran two computer simulations of the cementing job of the Macondo well that BP had contracted the company to perform and which was partially blamed for the subsequent blowout. The program manager destroyed the results as directed and similar evidence was also destroyed later, the department said.