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Originally Posted by Robbie
Who would be the ones putting them in prison? The U.S. or Great Britain? And isn't part of being a corporation the very fact that you are not PERSONALLY responsible for things just like this? I know when I opened my corp. it was for tax reasons...but I was also told that it protected me from being sued personally (like if someone was in my office and got hurt).
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Jurisdiction is very easy to establish, in fact it is likely that both the US and the UK could prosecute agents of BP. As for 'protection', being incorporated does not protect you from any criminal prosecution whatsoever. It protects you to a small degree from being sued personally (many institutions now require waivers before lending to a corp etc...) but it has ZERO impact on criminal prosecution. If you shoot someone in your office... saying the company owns the office doesn't protect you from a murder charge personally.
What BP did was not accidental, it wasn't even just negligence... it was willful neglect and recklessness in which executives at the company made the decision to skimp on safety measures as a method of increasing profits. Their decision to do that should make them personally liable for criminal prosecution and jail time... no differently than Enron executives being held criminally accountable.
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I'm not sure you can throw people in prison for making a wrong judgement call (especially if it's a corporate decision)?
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Yes, you can... and in this instance it would be even easier. They didn't make a wrong judgement call... they intentionally took steps to make things less safe and failed to have measures in place to protect the public from their antics as a way of increasing profits. This is *exactly* the kind of thing that executives should be jailed for to brighten the line between intelligently seeking profits and doing incredibly harmful things that damage the public for the sake of share prices.
