DISQUS

Name · 2 months ago

To put the scale of this fine one in proportion with a company the size of BP it is important to understand a few things. First, BP has so much money and such a huge cash flow that it almost never ever needs to use a commercial bank and instead refers to it's own internal finance department as "Treasury". On any given day almost $3 billion dollars flows thru "Treasury" which is why BP operates it's own internal trading operations to immediately move this money into various investments rather than let it sit idle. The scale of BP's "Treasury" operations are so huge that a $1 million dollar rounding error isn't common and none of the bean counters "has time" to chase down errors as small as that.

With $3 billion dollars flowing thru "Teasury" everyday, around the clock as a global company equates to approx $ 125 million dollars every hour and over $ 2 million dollars per minute. An $87 million dollar fine would seem enormous to most people and most companies. To BP that adds up to just a little bit over 44 minutes out of 525,600 minutes in an entire year. Nothing more than chump change to BP.