Source:
GuardianSarah Palin pleaded with Tony Hayward for a BP pipeline
Governor pressed oil boss for investment – a year after his company was responsible for the largest spill in Alaska's history
Jamie Doward, Ewen MacAskill in Juneau, Alaska, and Richard Rogers guardian.co.uk,
Saturday 11 June 2011 18.34 BST
Former Alaska governor Sarah Palin held private discussions with Tony Hayward, the discredited BP chief executive, to win his support for a 1,700-mile gas pipeline across North America a year after his company's failure to maintain another pipeline saw it blamed for the biggest oil spill in the state's history.
The revelation is contained in emails released from Palin's time as governor that were made public following freedom of information requests. Palin's Alaska Gasline Inducement Act was supposed to encourage energy producers to build a multibillion-dollar pipeline to deliver natural gas from Alaska's North Slope fields to the US. But the energy companies refused to back the plan, believing it was a bad deal.
In June 2007, two months after BP executives first poured cold water on Palin's bill before an influential Senate hearing, and a year after BP Alaska spilled more than 5,000 barrels of crude oil due to corroded pipes, the confidential emails show Palin was so desperate to talk to Hayward that she readjusted her schedules to take his call.
They reveal that Palin instructed her office to ensure that Hayward had all her private and official phone numbers so the call could proceed after his office asked for it to be rearranged.
Read more:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/jun/11/sarah-palin-tony-hayward-bp-pipeline-alaska