In response to two deadly 737 MAX crashes, Boeing said on Monday that it has struck a settlement with the US Department of Justice. According to court documents, this agreement would require the airline to be guilty of fraud.
The deal was reached after prosecutors found that Boeing had broken a previous settlement over the tragedies, which claimed the lives of 346 people in Ethiopia and Indonesia more than five years ago.
“We have reached an agreement in principle on terms of a resolution with the Justice Department, subject to the memorialization and approval of specific terms,” Boeing stated in an AFP statement.
According to court documents that were submitted on Sunday and filed in Texas, the business consented to enter a guilty plea to “conspiracy to defraud the United States” during the MAX aircraft certification process.
The agreement stipulates that Boeing will pay a fine and have to put at least $455 million into “compliance and safety programmes.” The court will decide how much money to provide families.
A DoJ ruling in mid-May that Boeing disregarded a 2021 deferred prosecution agreement (DPA) by failing to comply with standards to strengthen its compliance and ethics programme following the MAX tragedies set off the company’s most recent legal quagmire.
The settlement struck between Boeing and the DoJ “highly disappointed” the families of the MAX victims, according to a Clifford Law attorney who is representing them.
“Over the previous five years, a lot more information has been given to show that Boeing’s culture of prioritising money over safety hasn’t changed. Senior partner Robert A. Clifford stated in a statement, “This plea agreement only serves to further that skewed corporate objective.”
An opposition submitted by their legal team states that the families plan to request that the court reject the plea agreement at a future hearing.
Regarding allegations that Boeing purposefully misled the Federal Aviation Administration during the MAX’s certification, the first DPA was made public in January 2021.
Under the terms of the agreement, Boeing was shielded from criminal prosecution in exchange for paying $2.5 billion in fines and restitution.
This year was supposed to be the end of a three-year probationary period. However, an Alaska Airlines 737 MAX was forced to make an emergency landing in January after a fuselage panel blew out mid-flight, throwing Boeing back into crisis mode.
Boeing was accused by DoJ authorities of violating the DPA by “failing to design, implement, and enforce a compliance and ethics programme to prevent and detect violations of the US fraud laws throughout its operations,” in a letter dated May 14 that was sent to the US court.
