Boeing buys its way out of prison with $2.5 billion for 346 737 MAX deaths

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• Baji Nahid says:

  10 Jan10 January 04:17

  shocking, how to get away with murdering 346 people people. What a disgrace of a judgement. More insulting that the families get $500MIL but the airlines get more? A golden handshake is all it takes.

  • Baji Nahid says:

    10 Jan10 January 04:18

    thoughts are with all those impacted.

• Dubious says:

  10 Jan10 January 05:19

  Para 19 is illuminating with regards to the corporate culture and the company pressures that drive behaviour:
  “Boeing’s stated objectives in designing the 737 MAX included securing the FAA AEG’s
  determination to require no greater than “Level B” differences training in the 737 MAX FSB Report. Boeing Employee-1 and Boeing Employee-2 understood as much. For example, in or around November 2014, Boeing Employee-2 wrote in an internal Boeing electronic chat communication to Boeing Employee-1 that “nothing can jepordize [sic] level b[.]” In or around December 2014, Boeing Employee-1 wrote in an email to another Boeing employee that “if we lose Level B [it] will be thrown squarely on my shoulders. It was [Boeing Employee-1], yes [Boeing Employee-1]! Who cost Boeing tens of millions of dollars!”

  Seems like the judgement blaming two individual employees ignores the broader company responsibilities.

• Will CARPMAEL says:

  10 Jan10 January 05:54

  Sadly capitalism is broken

  • Andrew says:

    10 Jan10 January 10:13

    In communist countries, those challenging their state owned employer would simply have been shot.

    One side is no better than the other.

    • Chris Heyes says:

      10 Jan10 January 11:06

      i agee shoot them

  • Travel Strong says:

    10 Jan10 January 10:27

    In both systems, it’s corruption that is the downfall. Capitalism without corruption = productive competition and innovation.

    FAA and Boeing and Government collusion is corruption, not capitalism.

• Charlieface says:

  10 Jan10 January 06:21

  NPR report that ChrisC linked yesterday:

  https://www.npr.org/2021/01/08/954782512/boeing-to-pay-2-5-billion-settlement-over-deadly-737-max-crashes?t=1610194822522

  Quote: “If Boeing complies with the terms of the settlement, in three years the government will drop the criminal charge. That’s important for Boeing, a huge federal defense contractor, because a criminal conviction would prohibit the company from getting future government contracts.”

  Basically the US is trying to protect probably their biggest defence supplier, which is also based in the US, presumably in return for discounts.

  • The Savage Squirrel says:

    10 Jan10 January 07:55

    I’d imagine that Boeing are such a large supplier in terms of maintaining existing defence capability and equipment as well as future upgrades that there would be a very strong national security interest in not losing them as a supplier, which may have helped weigh the scales of “justice”…

• Mr(s) Entitled says:

  10 Jan10 January 07:30

  This stinks. But ‘justice’ very often does when the establishment is involved.

• PB says:

  10 Jan10 January 08:23

  Appalling that it should come down to money .

  A slap on the wrist for Boeing , if it is down to cash take as a comparison what the America did to BP , strange that its so inequitable .

  • Alex Sm says:

    10 Jan10 January 13:05

    Well, but what else you can do when the people are already gone? And, while loss of relatives is a terrible tragedy, getting $1.5m could change life of an Indonesian or an Ethiopian family for ever and for good

• Niklas Smith says:

  10 Jan10 January 08:36

  Sadly this Deferred Prosecution Agreement follows the pattern we have already seen in the financial sector:

  1) Big Bank accused of systematic breaches of law

  2) Responsible executives are ”Shocked, shocked!” to find gambling going on at Rick’s (having happily trousered stock-based incentive remuneration inflated by the profits of said illegal gambling)

  3) Responsible executives find some more junior employees to blame

  4) DPA with the regulator blames a couple of Rogue Employees and lets the executives off scot free. Shareholders pay a huge fine.

  5) DPA often does not even include admission of criminal wrongdoing by Big Bank despite multibillion dollar fine. Shareholders are in other words required to pay a fine for a crime that Big Bank supposedly did not commit.

  6) If said Rogue Employees are prosecuted they have far from always been found guilty… (E.g. Tesco, most of the Libor trials.)

  The Boeing DPA follows 1-4 exactly. At least in this case the company has admitted to criminal fraud so for once 5 doesn’t apply. We remain to see if 6 also applies. But the Congressional report into Boeing made clear that the 737 MAX safety problems were the result of much more than two lowly enployees…

  • kitten says:

    10 Jan10 January 09:03

    get your point but how many people died in the banking stuff

    • Niklas Smith says:

      10 Jan10 January 09:23

      @kitten: Which is exactly why Boeing should have been treated more harshly than the Big Banks rather than by the same playbook.

      Although given that HSBC was found to be laundering money for Mexican drug cartels I think there must have been some indirect deaths caused by that sort of crime…

      • Bonglim says:

        10 Jan10 January 16:44

        And the banks that damaged the economy in 2008 certainly cost lives. There is a direct link between financial hardship and shorter life. Multiply that by many many millions of people around the world and it adds up to a lot more than 346 lives.

• Nigel T says:

  10 Jan10 January 08:45

  It’s very simple isn’t it:
  VW : German company
  BP: British company
  Boeing: US company – which clearly trumps the deaths of nearly 350 people. “MAGA”!

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