"From what I've read, the Koch brothers are nothing more than businessmen and industrialists."
U.S. Indicts Koch Industries on Pollution Violations in Texas
Published: September 29, 2000
nytimes.com
WASHINGTON, Sept. 28 — A federal grand jury returned a 97-count indictment against Koch Industries today, charging the company, a subsidiary and four employees with environmental crimes at a Texas oil refinery.
The defendants were charged with violating federal air pollution and hazardous waste laws at the Koch Petroleum Group's West Plant refinery near Corpus Christi, Tex., conspiracy and making false statements to state environmental officials, the Justice Department said.
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sourcewatch.org
"Republican Ties
If convicted, the company faced fines of up to $352 million, plus possible jail time for company executives. After George W. Bush became president, however, the U.S. Justice Department dropped 88 of the charges. Two days before the trial, John Ashcroft settled for a plea bargain, in which Koch pled guilty to falsifying documents. All major charges were dropped, and Koch and Ashcroft settled the lawsuit for a fraction of that amount.
Koch had contributed $800,000 to the Bush election campaign and other Republican candidates.
Alex Beehler, assistant deputy under secretary of defense for Environment, Safety and Occupational Health, previously served at Koch as director of environmental and regulatory affairs and concurrently served at the Charles G. Koch Foundation as vice president for environmental projects. [23] Beehler was later nominated and re-nominated by the Bush White House, to become the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Inspector General. [24]
Other environmental crimes & convictions
According to an August 30, 2010 article in The New Yorker magazine, "In 1999, a jury found Koch Industries guilty of negligence and malice in the deaths of two Texas teen-agers in an explosion that resulted from a leaky underground butane pipeline. (In 2001, the company paid an undisclosed settlement.) And in the final months of the Clinton Presidency the Justice Department levelled a ninety-seven-count indictment against the company, for covering up the discharge of ninety-one tons of benzene, a carcinogen, from its refinery in Corpus Christi, Texas. The company was liable for three hundred and fifty million dollars in fines, and four Koch employees faced up to thirty-five years in prison. The Koch Petroleum Group eventually pleaded guilty to one criminal charge of covering up environmental violations, including the falsification of documents, and paid a twenty-million-dollar fine. David Uhlmann, a career prosecutor who, at the time, headed the environmental-crimes section at the Justice Department, described the suit as “one of the most significant cases ever brought under the Clean Air Act.”[25]"
Koch denied the charges.
The company faces a maximum statutory penalty of $48.5 million, or it could be fined twice what it gained from the criminal offenses.
The Justice Department said the company earned profits of more than $176 million in 1995, the year the government says it violated federal air pollution laws.
The indictment contends that Koch had won a waiver to comply with Clean Air Act limits on benzene until 1995, but that that year the company had at least 91 metric tons of uncontrolled benzene in its liquid waste streams, far more than the limit of six metric tons that applied to the refinery. |
