Internal E-mails Excluded from BP Case

Lawyers suing BP Plc and other defendants over the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill won't be able to use several internal e-mails in the trial over fault for the incident, according to a judge from a Louisiana District Court. One e-mail includes a comment from a BP geologist two months before the April 2010 well blowout referring to a "s---- y cement job" at the project.  

 

U.S. Magistrate Judge Sally Shushan said in a ruling that the comment about the cement job isn't a business record and "is not admissible,". Shushan also excluded an e-mail from a Halliburton employee who called tests before the blowout unsuccessful. London-based BP and Transocean Ltd., owner of the Deepwater Horizon rig that exploded, asked the judge to exclude the June 2010 e-mail, calling it hearsay.

 

In the e-mail, Ryan Haire of Halliburton told another company employee: "I read some report that stated that the two negative tests we did were considered successful? I stated that I found them to unsuccessful and I was checking to see if maybe you knew why Transocean and BP were calling them successful?" Shushan said about this mail that there is no evidence that Haire possessed personal knowledge that BP and Transocean called the two negative pressure tests successful.

 

She also barred use of several e-mails between managers at Anadarko Petroleum Corp., BP's partner in the well, written in 2009 over storm damage to another deepwater drilling rig. The material "is hearsay, and it is not admissible," Shushan said.

 

The nonjury trial begins 27^th  February 2012 in federal court in New Orleans before U.S. District Judge Carl Barbier. The case is In Re: Oil Spill by the Oil Rig Deepwater Horizon in the Gulf of Mexico on April 20, 2010, MDL-2179, U.S. District Court, Eastern District of Louisiana (New Orleans).