A former BP boss is to pay back more than £133,000 after being charged with insider trading in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon tragedy.
Keith Seilhan, a former crisis manager with the British oil giant, sold off his family’s entire $1million holding of BP stock after receiving confidential information about the scale of the oil spill in the wake of the 2010 disaster.
US financial watchdogs have charged him with using non-public information to reap unjust profits, after he sold off the stock on April 29 and April 30 2010, ahead of the BP share price collapsing.
Seilhan has not admitted or denied the allegations, but has agreed the settlement payment, which still requires approval by a US judge.
“Seilhan sold his family’s BP securities after he received confidential information about the severity of the spill that the public didn’t know,” said Daniel Hawke, chief of the Division of Enforcement’s Market Abuse Unit.
“Corporate insiders must not misuse the material nonpublic information they receive while responding to unique or disastrous corporate events, even where they stand to suffer losses as a consequence of those events.”
A lawyer for Mr Seilhan said the former BP official, who helped lead the clean-up and containment efforts in the Gulf of Mexico after the spill, did not want ‘further distraction and protracted litigation’.
The news comes ahead of this weekend’s fourth anniversary of the Macondo disaster, which saw 11 oil workers killed and almost five million barrels of oil leak into the Gulf of Mexico when gas from a well off the Louisiana coast leaked back into the riser and ignited, engulfing the Deepwater Horizon rig in flames.
BP agreed in 2012 to pay $525 million to settle a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission claim that the company publicly underestimated the size of the spill.
The company also pleaded guilty to obstruction of Congress related to its spill size estimate, part of a $4billion resolution of criminal charges brought by the U.S.
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