Chevron finally pays price for deaths

摘要

Eight years after four workers were killed in an explosion at the Pembroke Oil Refinery, Valero Energy UK, the current owner of the site, has been fined £5 million with £1 million costs. The bill will be paid by the US parent company of Chevron, which operated the site at the time and included an indemnification in its sale of the site to Valero two months later. The employer of three of the victims, B&A Contracts, was fined £120,000 with £40,000 costs. Among the notable aspects of the judgment (see pp.7-11) was that Mr Justice Clive Lewis used Chevron's UK annual turnover preceding the incident of several billions of pounds to sentence Valero as a very large organisation under the Sentencing Council's guideline on health and safety offences (HSB 445 p.18), even though Valero, with its most recent turnover of £27 million, was a medium-sized organisation. This allowed the judge to fix a meaningful and proportionate fine. On 2 June 2011, employees of B&A Contracts, which was a long-time tank-cleaning contractor at the refinery, were emptying a storage tank in the amine recovery unit using a vacuum tanker in preparation for further cleaning and maintenance. They were supported by a second contractor, Hertel.