Record Penalty Doesn't End BP's Woes

The company still has some gauntlet to run

All the oil has been cleaned up or has evaporated from the waters of the Gulf of Mexico—well, nearly all of it—while the spill itself seems to have receded into memory, something that transfixed us for months but which is now little more than grist for an episode of the Newsroom. (Note: the amnesia may not apply to Gulf residents.) The legal mess over the worst oil spill in U.S. history, however, is still far from being cleaned up.

Still, a big step was taken on Nov. 15 towards resolving the legal problems over the spill when BP announced that it would pay $4.5 billion in fines and other payments to the government and plead guilty to 14 criminal charges connected to the 2010 accident which resulted nearly 5 million barrels of crude being spilled into the Gulf—as well as the deaths of 11 crewmen aboard the doomed Deepwater Horizon rig. The total amounts to the largest single criminal fine in corporate history.