When You Go Up Against Big Oil In W’s America…
Hey, guess what happens when you go up against Big Oil in George W’s America?
For 22 years, Bobby Maxwell (pictured above) combed through the books of major oil producers. Maxwell’s job was to keep tabs on the billions of dollars worth of oil and gas that oil companies were extracting from land and coastal waters belonging to the U.S. tax-paying public. Along the way, Maxwell and his team uncovered hundreds of millions of dollars worth of royalties that oil companies were keeping from the American people.
In 2003, Bobby Maxwell received a citation from Gale A. Norton, who was secretary of the interior at the time. Norton said that “Mr. Maxwell’s career has been characterized by exceptional performance and significant contributions.” Norton went on to praise Maxwell’s “perseverance and leadership” while detailing his “many outstanding achievements.”
So what happened next? You guessed it. He was fired.
From the NYT piece:
Less than two years [after receiving his citation], the Interior Department eliminated his job in what it called a “reorganization.” That came exactly one week after a federal judge in Denver unsealed a lawsuit in which Mr. Maxwell contended that a major oil company had spent years cheating on royalty payments.
And check out this other blood-boiling graf from the Times piece:
In February, the Interior Department admitted that energy companies might escape more than $7 billion in royalty payments over the next five years because of errors in leases signed in the 1990s that officials are now scrambling to renegotiate. The errors were discovered in 2000, but were ignored for the next six years and have yet to be fixed.
This shit has got to stop.
(Maxwell is currently unemployed and in court, fighting one particular oil company who he claims still owes the government millions of dollars. The company looks like they want to settle out of court. Under the whistleblower legislation, Maxwell might be entitled to as much as 30% of the earnings that are owed to the government, which would make him a wealthy man. Packback’s a bitch. Hope he comes out on top.)
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