Whether that leads to actual convictions, who knows. But this Bloomberg article has some interesting analysis on one legal avenue for prosecution that could actually lead to punishment for BP, as a company, and top executives, including Tony Hayward, rather than simply focusing on the employees directly in charge of operations at the Deepwater Horizon site.
One hint of what a broader indictment might look like comes from an unlikely source: private civil-racketeering lawsuits that have been brought on behalf of property and business owners in Alabama, Louisiana, and Florida. One of the suits, filed on June 12 in federal district court in Pensacola, Florida, by the plaintiffs’ firm, Levin Papantonio Thomas Mitchell Echsner Rafferty & Proctor, accuses BP and Chief Executive Officer Tony Hayward not only of discrete instances of pollution; it also alleges the company engaged in an illegal “enterprise” to mislead regulators over a period of years.
… these events show that BP engaged in a scheme that violated the civil provisions of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. The RICO law was enacted in 1970 to help prosecutors put Mafiosi behind bars. It has been used more broadly against corporations and high-profile individuals, including junk-bond impresario Michael Milken in 1989. It allows prosecution of people who operate or oversee an illegal enterprise, even if they did not commit the main criminal acts in question. The maximum prison term is 20 years for each count.