Nick Waithaka Muhiu

[Your Name] [Instructor Name] [Course Number] [Date] BP PLC’s Unethical Business Actions BP PLC was founded in the year 1909 then called the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, and in 2001 it was renamed as BP PLC, it deals in the oil and gas industry (Mejri and Wolf). The company has been involved in many scandals of oil and gas accidents over the years. The explosion of BP PLC’s Texas City refinery in 2005, Alaskan BP PLC oil spill caused by corrosion of its pipeline and the latest Deepwater Horizon Spill (Mejri and Wolf). The impacts of these accidents have significantly affected people, even costing their lives, plus the environmental destructions have been irreversible. The essay will look at BP PLC’s unethical approach to conducting business that has led to these tragedies. BP PLC has gained a reputation for being one of the worst oil/gas companies. The Texas Public Interest Research Group said it was number one in accidents between- (Mejri and Wolf). The main reason is their unethical management procedures which have led to poor planning, oversight, and maintenance of oil rigs. The mismanagement by the company has been a catalyst for oil spills. (Mejri and Wolf) state that most investigations of BP PLC accidents showed that BP PLC had near zero prevention systems and ignored safety guidelines. The deliberate action by BP PLC to ignore such regulations has led to the deaths of people, damaged property and destroyed the environment. The second unethical approach by BP PLC is dishonesty in its business. BP PLC had made decisions that saved on company time and cost but risked the Deepwater Horizon blowout, and there was evidence of a gas leak, but BP PLC ignored this and continued to drill. The lack of honesty by the BP PLC leaders to accept the facts that the rig had lots of risks and needed costly mitigations to ensure the safety of the oil rig contributed to the accident. BP PLC showed that they focused on profits and not on safety and this has been shown to have occurred in most of the other disasters that have happened under BP PLC’s nose. Nonetheless, BP PLC has been able to fight off the blame for these accidents over the years. The first approach it has used is using its vast cash reserve to lobby against strict rules in the oil/gas industry. BP had spent $625 million in- lobbying against the laws (Mejri and Wolf). The second is marketing. BP used $ 200 million in advertising from 2000 to show that they are an environmentally friendly company (Mejri and Wolf). This boosted their brand awareness and even got them ranked position one in the Climate Change Strategies companies in 2006 (Mejri and Wolf). These fallacies by BP have led to nothing, but the destruction of people’s lives and the ecosystem all in the name of creating profits for BP. In conclusion, BP’s wrong business approach has led to the deaths of people and catastrophic destruction of the environment due to greediness and negligence by their management. While this happens, they still managed to evade the aftershocks of the accidents they caused and continued to do business as usual with little improvement. BP needs harsh rules be applied to them with extensive monitoring of their daily operations to avoid cases such as the Deepwater Horizon blowout. Work Cited Mejri, Mohamed and Daniel De Wolf. "Crisis Management: Lessons Learnt from the BP Deepwater Horizon Spill Oil ." Business Management and Strategy (2013): 67-90. Document.