Don Blankenship, former CEO of Massey Energy (King Coal in West Virginia), was just indicted for putting profits above the lives of his company's employees resulting in a 2010 explosion that killed 29 miners at the Upper Big Branch mine in West Virginia.
Those are among the charges contained in a federal indictment announced on November 13 by the Department of Justice. According to the West Virginia MetroNews Network,
The 43-page four-count federal indictment
of former Massey Energy president and CEO Don Blankenship portrays an
operator obsessive about upping production at the cheapest cost. Federal
prosecutors allege it was an attitude that led to the deadly explosion
at the Upper Big Branch mine in Raleigh County that killed 29 miners.
The indictment, announced Thursday by U.S.
Attorney Booth Goodwin, alleges Blankenship knew about UBB’s safety
problems and the practice of alerting supervisors underground when
federal mine inspectors arrived at UBB for inspections. It’s also
alleged he lied to the U.S. Securities Exchange Commission about mine
safety in the days after the April 5, 2010 explosion in an attempt to
help Massey’s stock price.
Blankenship was charged with conspiracy to
violate mandatory federal mine safety and health standards, conspiracy
to impede federal mine safety officials, making false statements to the
United States Securities and Exchange Commission and securities
fraud....
The indictment alleges Blankenship was
driven by the numbers and in doing so ignored dozens of safety
violations at UBB and covered up others. Federal prosecutors said from
April 3, 2009, to April 5, 2010, Blankenship received 249 daily safety
violation reports from the UBB mines but did very little to correct the
problems.
The indictment accuses Blankenship of lying to federal officials and stockholders about these "willful violations of safety laws" at the mine.
Federal prosecutors charge Blankenship with brute indifference to ensuring a safe working environment, including this criminal allegation:
Blankenship’s imposition and aggressive
enforcement of coal-production quotas that deprived UBB’s coal miners of
the time they needed to construct and maintain ventilation control
structures, and that forced them to operate even where air quantities
were below legal minimums; Blankenship’s direction, addressed below, not
to construct certain ventilation controls that would produce more
reliable airflow because constructing them diverted time from coal
production; and Blankenship’s denial, also addressed below, of a request
to construct an airshaft at UBB that would have increased airflow to
areas of the mine where it was often below the legal minimum.
Blankenship, who is no longer CEO of Massey (which was acquired by Alpha Natural Resources corporation), was paid nearly $18 million dollars in 2009. During his tenure as CEO of Massey, Blankenship ensured strong financial backing for Republican candidates - and was repeatedly accused of trying to buy the West Virginia Supreme Court through campaign contributions (supreme court judges are elected in West Virginia) and even vacationing with at least one of them.
In a Senate hearing on the Upper Big Branch deaths - held on May 20 of 2010 - Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA) read from a 2005 Blankenship internal email to administrators, as Blankenship sat before the committee:
In a memo from you, dated October 19th,
2005, you told your company's deep mine superintendents that running
coal is the top priority in the mines. Here's a quote: “If any of you
have been asked by your group presidents, your supervisors, engineers,
or anyone else to do anything other than run coal - i.e., build
overcasts, do construction jobs or whatever - you need to ignore them
and run coal. This memo is necessary only because we seem not to
understand that the coal pays the bills, end quote.”
taken from here
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