BP agreed last night to pay $303m to settle charges that it had manipulated the propane gas market in the United States.
BP was charged last year with price-rigging by cornering the propane market during illegal energy trading in 2004. A Department of Justice lawsuit alleged that one trader told another: “Dude, you’re the […]

Texas oil billionaire Oscar Wyatt faces up to two years in prison after pleading guilty to paying an illegal kickback to the regime of late Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein in exchange for the right to purchase oil.
The surprise plea, coming in the third week of a trial related to the United Nations oil-for-food program, ends […]

Bill Allen, the former chairman of VECO Corp, has testified that he paid a lawmaker nearly $8,000 to help keep him in office and advocate for the construction of a natural gas pipeline tapping the state’s vast North Slope Reserves.
The money was paid to former House Speaker Pete Kott in an inflated invoice for a […]

An extraordinary political drama is unfolding in Alaska as both the FBI and federal grand juries investigate Ted Stevens, the nation’s longest-sitting Republican senator, and his son Ben Stevens, a former state Senate president whose office was twice searched by federal agents last year.
The wide-ranging public-corruption investigation started with bribery allegations in the Juneau statehouse. […]

The U.S. Justice Department is conducting a criminal inquiry of nearly a dozen oil and oil-services companies, focusing on potentially illegal payments – bribes - to customs agents who provided freight forwarding and other services, including in Nigeria.
A civil investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission also is under way.