Deepwater Horizon

As the U.S. government took aggressive steps to assess blame across the private sector for the Deepwater Horizon disaster, a 10 percent non-operating minority investor faced the real possibility of guilt by association. This company needed to disappear from all media coverage of the spill, and it needed to do so fast. The first priority was to underscore the actual disaster narrative, which would confirm that the company was just a passive investor and a non-operator. Later, and over a three-day period, a senior company official was prepped to testify before a key Congressional committee, even as trusting relationships were formed with the ever-growing media contingent that reported on this story daily. Result: at no point since the disaster has the company’s name ever been immediately associated with the spill.