Boeing CEO Dave Calhoun speaks during a Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Investigations Subcommittee hearing on Boeing’s broken safety culture on Capitol Hill on 18 June 2024 in Washington, DC. (Andrew Harnik / GETTY IMAGES NORTH AMERICA / Getty Images via AFP)
Boeing
on Monday said it had “reached an agreement” with the US Department
of Justice over two fatal 737 MAX crashes more than five years ago.
“We
have reached an agreement in principle on terms of a resolution with the
Justice Department, subject to the memorialisation and approval of specific
terms,” Boeing told AFP in a statement.
The
deal comes after prosecutors concluded the aviation giant flouted an earlier
settlement addressing the disasters, in which 346 people were killed in
Ethiopia and Indonesia.
Sources
told AFP last week that Boeing was on a deadline to accept or reject a DoJ
proposal that would require it to plead guilty to fraud during the
certification of MAX airplanes.
Boeing’s
latest legal predicament was triggered by a DoJ determination in mid-May that
the company ignored a 2021 deferred prosecution agreement (DPA) by not meeting
requirements to improve its compliance and ethics program after the MAX
crashes.
Families
of MAX victims were “highly disappointed” by the deal reached between
Boeing and the DoJ, an attorney at Clifford Law representing them said.
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“Much
more evidence has been presented over the last five years that demonstrates
that the culture of Boeing putting profits over safety hasn’t changed. This
plea agreement only furthers that skewed corporate objective,” senior
partner Robert A. Clifford said in a statement.
We live in a world where facts and fiction get blurred
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