Boeing will shell out more than $1 billion but avoided prosecution over two crashes involving its 737 Max planes that killed 346 people, the Justice Department said Friday
The non-prosecution agreement allows the aerospace giant to avoid being branded a convicted felon and was harshly criticized by many families who lost relatives in the crashes and had pressed prosecutors to take the Boeing the planemaker to trial.
A lawyer for family members and two US senators had urged the Justice Department not to abandon its prosecution, but the government quickly rejected the requests.
“This kind of non-prosecution deal is unprecedented and obviously wrong for the deadliest corporate crime in US history. My families will object and hope to convince the court to reject it,” said Paul Cassell, a lawyer representing many of the families.
Boeing agreed to pay an additional $444.5 million into a crash victims’ fund that would be divided evenly per crash victim on top of an additional $243.6 million fine.
The Justice Department expects to file the written agreement with Boeing by the end of next week. Boeing will no longer face oversight by an independent monitor under the agreement.
Boeing will pay in total over $1.1 billion including the fine and compensation to families and over $455 million to strengthen the company’s compliance, safety, and quality programs, the Justice Department said.
“Boeing must continue to improve the effectiveness of its anti-fraud compliance and ethics program and retain an independent compliance consultant,” the department said Friday. “We are confident that this resolution is the most just outcome with practical benefits.”
Boeing did not immediately respond to The Post’s request for comment.
Its stock ticked down 0.5% Friday.
The planemaker and major military contractor had been scheduled to face trial on June 23 over a Lion Air flight that crashed in October 2018 and an Ethiopian Airlines flight that went down just a few months later.
Its popular 737 Max was grounded worldwide for nearly two years and the company suffered severe reputation damage, losing nearly $12 billion last year.
Boeing — which recently clinched a $20 billion contract with the White House to build fighter jets — had reached previous settlements with the US government that have fallen through.
In 2021, it agreed to pay a $2.51 billion fine to avoid prosecution. That fine included a $243.6 million criminal penalty, a $500 million fund for the victims’ family members and $1.77 billion for its airline customers.
That settlement was due to expire last year, but just two days after the deadline, a door panel blew out on a 737 Max operated by Alaska Airlines, intensifying scrutiny on the already tarnished company.
An investigation found the plane had left Boeing’s factory without having key bolts installed to hold the door panel in place.
US prosecutors argued that Boeing had violated the terms of its 2021 settlement by failing to enforce a compliance and ethics program to catch violations of fraud laws.
The government had accused Boeing of concealing information about the use of a flight-control system on the Max planes that was later implicated in the 2018 crashes.
A former Boeing pilot, Mark Forkner, told the FAA to delete the MCAS flight-control system from manuals – then bragged in a separate email about “jedi-mind tricking” regulators, according to a government investigation.
Last July, Boeing reached a new settlement agreement that included pleading guilty to the criminal fraud charge. It would have paid a fine of up to $487.2 million under that deal.
But that settlement was rejected by a federal judge over concerns about the Justice Department’s DEI standards for hiring a government-appointed monitor to oversee the company.
Family members of the crash victims had slammed these previous agreements as “sweetheart deals.”
This story originally appeared on NYPost
