Tuesday, June 22, 2010

Who Knew What and When About the BP Problem?

It is being reported that the Deepwater Horizon problem started way back on February 13.  To make matters worse, this Administration knew about the issue.  However, there was no public dissemination of this information.  The following are some excerpts from the article:
  1. It seems incomprehensible that the president and other members of the administration still have jobs when it is now being reported that the federal government was apprised by BP on February 13 that the Deepwater Horizon oil rig was leaking oil and natural gas into the ocean floor.
  2. In fact, according to documents in the administration's possession, BP was fighting large cracks at the base of the well for roughly ten days in early February. 
  3. Further it seems the administration was also informed about this development, six weeks before to the rig's fatal explosion when an engineer from the University of California, Berkeley, announced to the world a near miss of an explosion on the rig by stating, "They damn near blew up the rig."
Further, according to regulatory filings with the SEC, RawStory has found that Goldman Sachs sold 4,680,822 shares of BP in the first quarter of 2010.  Goldman’s sales were the largest of any firm during that time.  Goldman would have pocketed slightly more than $266 million if their holdings were sold at the average price of BP’s stock during the quarter.  Now, what did Goldman Sachs know?

Finally, Tony Hayward, CEO, liquidated about a third of his holding in the company one month before the Deepwater Horizon disaster.  Superb market timing, or did he use insider information to benefit from this knowledge?

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