CORPORATE CRIME REPORTER
Grand Jury Subpoena Sends Vinson & Elkins to BP Alaska
20
Corporate Crime Reporter 25(1), June 14, 2006
Lawyers from Vinson & Elkins will
descend this week upon the offices of BP Alaska (BPXA) at Prudhoe Bay to collect
documents requested by a federal grand jury in Anchorage.
BP Alaska is being investigated by the grand jury for a March 2006 oil spill
of 270,000 gallons of crude oil at Prudhoe Bay that was caused by corrosion
of a crude oil pipeline.
According to an internal BPXA e-mail from Kemp Copeland to BP Alaska staff dated
June 8, 2006, lawyers from Vinson & Elkins will be at BP’s Prudhoe
Bay facilities “to identify and duplicate documentation that may be responsive
to the government's subpoena.”
“The V&E teams will be visiting the major oil production facilities
and offices in the Prudhoe Bay Unit arriving June 11th and departing June 20th,”
Copeland wrote.
“An interview schedule will be developed, and some of you will receive
a telephone call within the next few days to set up an interview time,”
Copeland advised. “While the teams will do their best to minimize disruptions
and to accommodate prior commitments, please be as flexible as possible when
it comes to your availability.”
“The document collection interviews will be conducted by the V&E teams
and will focus primarily on identifying documents, paper and electronic, which
are responsive to the subpoena,” Copeland wrote.
“Any hard-copy responsive documents that are needed for day-to-day operations
will be temporarily taken to the PBOC [Prudhoe Bay Operations Center] where
they will be scanned and returned within a day,” Copeland wrote. “If
you have any questions regarding this process, please feel free to raise them
when you are contacted by the document collection team to schedule your interview.”
In a related development, Congressman John Dingell (D-Michigan) this week called
on the Department of Transportation to explain why it is letting BP Alaska escape
from a June 15 deadline to correct the corrosive pipe problems that are plaguing
its Prudhoe Bay operations.
"The Department of Transportation must explain why it is not requiring
BP to meet all of the requirements of the (order) imposed after the spill,"
Dingell said. "Did the Department of Transportation not mean what it said
in the order? Or are the BP pipelines in such a sorry state that compliance
is impossible?"
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