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Lawsuit Alleges Anadarko Covered Up Risks on Mozambique Project

November 14, 2019 Natalie Posgate

A terminated project risk manager for Anadarko has sued the Woodlands-based company on allegations that it prioritized profits over safety by downplaying to its board and investors the risks the professional laid out in reports regarding a multibillion-dollar LNG project in Mozambique. 

According to the lawsuit, Anadarko’s soft-pedaling not only forced the plaintiff, Waylon Whitehead, to file a whistleblower complaint for which Anadarko retaliated against him; it was followed by an act of terrorism in the area in which an Anadarko contractor was beheaded earlier this year, the lawsuit says.

Officials with Occidental, which bought Anadarko earlier this year, have not responded to requests for comment on the federal lawsuit, which was filed Monday in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas. 

Whitehead’s lawyer, Sugar Land-based solo practitioner Hessam Parzivand, declined further comment, citing he would likely not get client approval to talk to the media, and even if he did, “I would not be adding anything factual about the case.”

Although a letter written by Anadarko included in the complaint says the company hired Whitehead as a contractor through Global Edge, a staffing services company, Whitehead argues in the lawsuit that he was an employee of Anadarko from January 2018 to October 2018. He further argues that he was considered an employee under the Sarbanes-Oxley Act.

Whitehead claims that Anadarko brought him on to analyze and report all risks associated with the Mozambique LNG project, which Anadarko decided to move forward with in June. 

The project, which will construct a $20 billion liquefaction and export terminal in Mozambique, is the largest single LNG project to be approved in Africa and is expected to be an economic game-changer for one of the poorest nations in the world, other media outlets reported at the time. 

Around the time he was hired, the lawsuit says, one of Whitehead’s supervisors told him “to not fully report risks, particularly political risks that could offend government partners.”

Even so, Whitehead tried to report “many material risks” that he encountered during his analysis. In spite of this, the lawsuit alleges, officers at Anadarko “intentionally eliminated” risks laid out in his reports. 

“These executives were committed to pumping up and speeding up projected revenue while also downgrading significant risks that would cause great expense to Anadarko in order to obtain approval of the Mozambique project without regard to shareholder, stakeholder, and financier well-being.”

In an Anadarko letter to the Department of Labor that was included as an exhibit in the lawsuit and addresses Whitehead’s whistleblower complaint, Anadarko argues that Whitehead was not an employee and thus is not protected under the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. 

The company also argues that Whitehead’s supervisor, Rob Miesen, did not edit his report for deceptive purposes as Whitehead argues, but rather because he found it deficient, and merely of draft quality. These efforts to revise the report to make it useful to the company were “to no avail,” the letter says, and, despite Whitehead’s arguments, the report was never intended to be shared with Anadarko’s shareholders. 

Anadarko further argued that even if Whitehead is covered by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, “his complaint should be dismissed because he failed to identify any activity protected by the [act] which he claims to have engaged.”

Houston labor and employment lawyer Shauna Clark of Norton Rose Fulbright sent the letter on Anadarko’s behalf in March. Clark did not return a message seeking comment. 

The exact details of the events that led to Whitehead’s termination are unclear, but the lawsuit says he was let go on Sept. 28, 2018, within two days after Miesen made the “alterations” to his report. 

“The termination was part of the cover up of these action risks,” the lawsuit says. 

Whitehead filed his whistleblower complaint in early 2019, three weeks before the Anadarko contractor was beheaded in the Mozambique terrorist attack, the lawsuit says.

The lawsuit also names two individual defendants, Vice President of LNG Business Development Rory Madden and Senior Vice President of Mozambique LNG Ian Perks, who supervised Whitehead and whose jobs at Anadarko“depended on the board green lighting the project,” Whitehead alleges. 

Natalie Posgate

Natalie Posgate covers pro bono work, public service and diversity within the Texas legal community.

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