How hard did the oil giant lobby for the release of a terrorist?
We're happy to report that BP has at last replied to our questions about what, if anything, the company had to do with last August's release of Abdel Baset al-Megrahi, the only man ever convicted for the 1988 bombing of Pan Am 103 that killed 270. Too bad it seems to have taken Congressional demands for an investigation to prompt the oil giant to become even minimally responsive.
In an email sent on Thursday, a BP spokesperson says that "The decision to release Mr. Al Megrahi in August 2009 was taken by the Scottish Government. It is not for BP to comment on the decision of the Scottish Government. BP was not involved in any discussions with the UK Government or the Scottish Government about the release of Mr. Megrahi."
We'll take BP at its word on that one. But BP also admits that in late 2007 it told the British government that "we were concerned about the slow progress that was being made in concluding a Prisoner Transfer Agreement with Libya. We were aware that this could have a negative impact on UK commercial interests, including the ratification by the Libyan Government of BP's exploration agreement."
The transfer agreement was signed in 2007. Within weeks, Tripoli formally ratified a $900 million deal with BP to drill deep water wells off the Libyan coast. But BP continued to run into bureaucratic hurdles until Megrahi was finally released by the Scottish government, ostensibly on the compassionate grounds that he had only three months to live.
The British doctor who made that prognosis (and was paid for it by the Libyans) recently said Megrahi may yet live another decade, only to claim after an uproar that those words were taken out context. In any case, Megrahi is still alive a year later, the British government now says his release was a mistake, and BP is set to begin drilling off Libya's shores later this summer.
What we still don't know is how hard BP lobbied the British government to secure the transfer agreement. One key figure is Mark Allen, a politically connected former MI6 officer who became an adviser to BP in 2004 and raised the matter with then-U.K. Justice Minister Jack Straw in 2007. The company hasn't answered our request for details of Mr. Allen's conversations with Mr. Straw.
Four Senate Democrats—New Jersey's Frank Lautenberg and Robert Menendez, and New York's Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand—have written Hillary Clinton urging the State Department to investigate whether BP was "willing to trade justice in the murder of 270 people for oil profits." The Senate Foreign Relations Committee has scheduled a hearing for later this month.
BP executives have not had a particularly good time of it lately in front of Congressional committees. So before it comes to that, they could help themselves by fully answering the questions about their role in this fiasco.
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