The Department of Justice sent several letters in May to companies connected to the oil rig that exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, instructing them to preserve documents relating to the spill.
Among them, Cameron International Corporation and Mitsui Oil Exploration Company, Ltd., received letters May 5 ordering them to retain all “potentially relevant information,” Bloomberg reported. The letters were released in response to a Freedom of Information Act request.
Cameron, a Fortune 500 company based in Houston, Texas, specializes in pressure control systems. It manufactured the Deepwater Horizon oil rig’s blowout preventer, which was designed to stop the flow of oil and gas during a pressure surge.
But for unknown reasons, the blowout preventer failed to close during the disaster, and BP’s underwater robots could not close it manually in the days immediately following the spill.
Mitsui Oil explores new areas for crude oil and natural gas production, operating in Southeast Asia, the U.S., Middle East, North Africa and the North Sea. It won an open bid to participate in an “ultra deep gas exploration project” in the Gulf of Mexico in conjunction with BP Exploration & Production Inc.
Naoki Ishii, assistant secretary at Moex USA — which is owned by Mitsui Oil — told the Justice Department in a May 10 letter, “we had already made arrangements to preserve possibly relevant materials, including paper and electronic documents,” according to Bloomberg.
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