Koch Brothers’ lawbreaking: Benzene emissions

by David Safier

This is my third summary of information from the Bloomberg News story, Koch Brothers Flout Law Getting Richer With Secret Iran Sales. (Here are the first and the second.) Once again, it's clear the Koch Brothers are poster children for the need for rigorous government regulations and oversight. But their greed-posing-as-libertarian-philosophy proclaims we need less regulation, not more:

“My overall concept is to minimize the role of government and to maximize the role of the private economy and maximize personal freedoms,” David Koch told the National Journal in May 1992.

Here's a tale about what the Brothers K do to"maximize [their] personal freedoms" when they think they can get away with it.

In 1995, two Koch Brothers refineries in Corpus Christi installed an anti-pollution device to burn off excess benzene. Yes, they installed it, but it was disconnected a few days later. Apparently, it wasn't big enough to do the job.

Three months after disconnecting the machine, Koch filed a quarterly report with Texas regulators, while concealing that it had violated the emission rules.

Sally Barnes- Soliz, who worked in the safety department of the refineries, calculated they were spewing 91 tons of benzene emissions into the atmosphere, 15 times higher than the allowable level. She was told by the company she had to change the number. When she wouldn't, her bosses made the change anyway.

Barnes-Soliz’s bosses went around her. On April 8, 1996, Koch reported to Texas regulators that its Corpus Christi plant had uncontrolled emissions of 0.61 metric tons for 1995, or 1/149th the quantity she had found.

“When I saw they had actually falsified that document, I had no recourse but to notify the authorities,” Barnes-Soliz says.

Barnes-Soliz told state regulators about the real numbers. When Koch found out what she did,

Koch stripped her of her responsibilities and moved her to an empty office with no tasks and no e-mail access, she says.

“They were pressuring me to quit,” she says.

She left the company in July 1996. Barnes-Soliz sued Koch in January 1997, saying the company harassed and mistreated her after she became a whistle-blower. Koch settled the lawsuit in July 1999 for an undisclosed amount.

The case went to court.

A federal grand jury issued a 97-count indictment against Koch Petroleum Group, Mietlicki and three refinery managers on Sept. 28, 2000. Koch Petroleum Group pleaded guilty to a felony charge of lying to the government about its benzene emissions in April 2001.

Judge Jack fined Koch Petroleum $10 million and ordered that it pay another $10 million to fund environmental projects in south Texas. Koch earned $176 million in profit from the Corpus Christi plant in 1995, prosecutors told the court. The company said in a hearing that it would have cost $7 million to comply with the benzene emission regulation.

Maybe it's unfair to single these guys out. Maybe this is corporate business as usual, and the Brothers K are just typical big businessmen. If that's the case, all the more reason why we have to keep a close watch on these amoral/immoral captains of industry. A shark gotta be a shark, and many corporations gotta be amoral/immoral corporations. It just makes good sense to be on our guard for sharks getting their teeth too close to human beings. And we need to be similarly on guard against the natural, dangerous excesses of corporations and their billionaire leaders.