THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

This sort of behavior would be perfectly legal and encouraged by the other lawmakers. Sadly the dumbass was a private citizen and that qualifies as "insider trading".

Speaking of oil slicks …

Federal securities investigators say that the man that BP initially put in charge of cleaning up the oil from its massive 2010 Macondo well blowout in the Gulf of Mexico used nonpublic information to safely dump $1 million of his family’s company stock before the share price nosedived.

In a federal court suit filed in U.S. District Court in New Orleans, the Securities and Exchange Commission charged Keith A. Seilhan, 47, of Tomball, Texas, with insider trading. Without admitting or denying the allegations, Seilhan agreed to settle the charges for the negotiated sum of $223,000, including $105,409 in civil penalties. He is no longer with the company.

“Corporate insiders must not misuse the material nonpublic information they receive while responding to unique or disastrous corporate events, even where they stand to suffer losses as a consequence of those events,” said Daniel Hawke, chief of the Market Abuse Unit in the SEC’s Division of Enforcement.

An experienced crisis manager, Seilhan was pressed into action soon after the company’s Deep Horizon oil rig exploded on April 20, 2010, causing the well cap on the ocean floor to fail to seal.

He was tapped to coordinate BP’s oil collection and cleanup in the gulf and along the coast. From BP’s Incident Command Center in Houma, La., Seilhan directed BP’s oil skimming operations and its efforts to contain expansion of the spill.

The SEC’s suit alleges that on April 29, BP was publicly estimating that the oil was gushing from the well at the rate of up to 5,000 barrels per day, as it reported to the SEC.

The actual flow rate was later estimated to be between 52,700 and 62,200 barrels per day, news that helped send the company’s share prices plunging from over $52 to close as low as $26.83, trading records show.

But Seilhan and his family didn’t suffer the consequences.

Two questions left unanswered in this McClatchy article, how much did he profit and how much may be covered by insurance that executives at his level often have?