Before:
– Transocean Hails ‘Best Year’ In SAFETY, Gives Execs Bonuses, Despite Gulf Spill
The statement ‘MAY HAVE BEEN INSENSITIVE’ is still NOT an admission that the statement actually was insensitive.
As George Carlin said: “They don’t give a fuck about you!”
A few days ago Transocean stunned every sapient creature (with a memory just a little longer than that of momos chasing every up and downtick of Travelzoo stock) in the world after it announced it had achieved an “exemplary” safety record last year as measured by its total recordable incident rate and total potential severity rate, which in turn justified executives’ safety bonuses. For those who may have forgotten last year’s unprecedented Gulf oil spill, this is comparable to TEPCO announcing next year that management will receive record bonuses due to the company’s unprecedented ability to avoid hazard, not to mention nuclear power plant meltdown and recriticality. Luckily, it only took a few days for the firm’s PR division to realize someone may get very angry with the company’s spin of events, and as Reuters reports, the company has “acknowledged that its description of 2010 as its “best year in safety” despite a blowout that sank one of its rigs, killing 11 workers and causing a huge oil spill, might be insensitive.”
More on this unbelievable vocabulary malfunction:
Ihab Toma, the company’s executive vice president of global business, said some wording in that statement “may have been insensitive” given the Deepwater Horizon accident caused by a blown-out BP <BP.L> well in the Gulf of Mexico last year.
“Nothing in the proxy was intended to minimize this tragedy or diminish the impact it has had on those who lost loved ones. Everyone at Transocean continues to mourn the loss of these friends and colleagues.” Toma said in a statement on Monday.
Earlier on Monday, U.S. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar had disputed Transocean’s claim that its safety record last year justified executives’ safety bonuses. He told reporters on a conference call that Transocean was “at some fault” for causing millions of barrels of crude oil to leak from the underwater well.
On Friday, the head of the Interior Department’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management had chastised Transocean Chief Executive Steven Newman for not doing more to encourage two employees to attend a hearing this week for the government’s probe of the oil spill.
And while America continues to eat shrimp and who knows what which “most certainly” has far less than the legal threshold of oil content in it, the company’s executives keep getting richer.
Newman, who became CEO of the rig contractor less than two months before the April 20 blow-out, received $6.4 million in 2010, including $850,000 in base pay and a $5.4 million long-term incentive award, according to the filing on Friday.
We can’t wait for TEPCO’s CEO to emerge from the hospital following his hospitalization for a headache a few days after Fukushima blew up, if only to collect his well-deserved multi-million bonus from a nationalized TEPCO, and for the general irradiated population to simply shrug its shoulders. After all, the conditioning treatment that nothing can ever change in the klepocratic oligarchy is now all too well embedded.
Submitted by Tyler Durden on 04/04/2011 20:55 -0400
Source: ZeroHedge