A former Haliburton manager pleaded guilty in US federal court on Tuesday to destroying evidence of the company’s connection with the 2010 Gulf of Mexico spill.
Anthony Badalamenti, previously cementing technology director, faces a maximum sentence of a year in prison and a $100,000 fine, is subject to sentencing on January 21.
The plea comes a month after Halliburton pleaded guilty to similar charges over the deletion of computer simulations of the stability of the Macondo well.
As a result, Halliburton had to pay a $200,000 fine for misdemeanor; the company also agreed to be on probation for three years and to make a voluntary $55million contribution to the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation.
The company was BP’s cement contractor on the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig; it claimed that BP’s decision to use six centralisers for casing the wellbore, and not 21 recommended by Halliburton, made the well less stable.
According to prosecutors, in May 2010 Badalamenti directed a senior program manager to run computer simulations, which suggested there was little difference between using six or 21 centralisers.
Badalamenti is accused of instructing the program manager to delete the result.
The April 20 2010 rig explosion killed 11 workers; the US government says 4.9million barrels of oil spilled into the sea. It took 87 days to contain the well.
Badalamenti was the fist individual to plea guilty in the Gulf of Mexico spill trial.
BP well site leaders Robert Kaluza and Donald Vidrine await a trial next year on manslaughter charges stemming from the rig workers’ deaths.
Former BP executive David Rainey is charged with concealing information from Congress about the amount of oil that was spewing from the blown-out well in 2010, while former BP engineer Kurt Mix is charged with deleting text messages and voicemails about the company’s response to the spill.