BP: No Smoking Gun in Oil Spill

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- BP(BP) said Wednesday it's far from the only one to blame, and there is no single cause for the Deepwater Horizon rig disaster and Gulf of Mexico oil spill. The key phrase in the BP report which will figure prominently in the protracted legal and regulatory wrangling in the aftermath of the oil spill is "multiple companies, and work teams contributed to the accident."

For "multiple companies" investors can read between the lines without even delving more deeply into the BP report to rig operator Transocean(RIG) and deep-sea engineer Halliburton(HAL), responsible for cementing the Macondo well. Or one can just read the comment from outgoing BP CEO Tony Hayward that accompanied the report: "Multiple parties, including BP, Halliburton and Transocean, were involved."

The word "accident" itself takes issue with any argument that BP was "grossly negligent" in its actions leading up to the oil spill disaster.

The BP message that there is no single cause for the oil spill won't come as a surprise to many investors, regulators or the public. BP has made the case all along that there is no smoking gun linking gross negligence on the part of the British oil giant to the oil spill. The expectation was that BP would attempt to spread the blame around, without making it seem as if it was trying to shirk responsibility itself, and the report more or less accomplishes this task.

In any event, here are some brief highlights from the executive summary of the report provided by BP.

The exact wording from BP about the no single cause argument: "no single factor caused the Macondo well tragedy. Rather, a sequence of failures involving a number of different parties led to the explosion and fire which killed 11 people and caused widespread pollution in the Gulf of Mexico earlier this year."

The oil spill was the result of "a complex and interlinked series of mechanical failures, human judgments, engineering design, operational implementation and team interfaces."

That phrase should keep the courts busy for years to come. One sticking point in the phrase, however, is that BP has said all along that its engineering design was not to blame for the oil spill. In his testimony before Congress, outgoing CEO Hayward was grilled about the design of the well and the choices related to the final cementing completed by Halliburton.

Testimony provided to Congress by the top executives at the other major integrated global oil companies indicated that BP's well design was flawed and would not be used by any of these companies as an industry standard.