BP Plea Waived Privacy of Attorney Spill Records, U.S. Says
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BP Plc’s exploration unit no longer has legal grounds to withhold from the U.S. documents detailing its calculations for the oil flow rate during the 2010 Gulf of Mexico spill, prosecutors said.
The company’s guilty plea to criminal charges means it can’t assert attorney-client privilege to keep the information confidential, prosecutors said yesterday in a filing in federal court in New Orleans. Since BP’s lawyers were “intimately involved” in aiding the company’s criminal conduct, the customary shield over their work is eliminated, the U.S. said.