US to criminally charge Boeing over two fatal 737 Max crashes and seek guilty plea, sources say
A Lion Air crash in 2018 and Ethiopian Airlines crash in 2019 killed 346 people.
Members of a rescue team bring items and wreckage ashore at a port in North Jakarta after they were recovered from the sea where Lion Air flight JT610 crashed on Oct 29, 2018. (File photo: AFP/RESMI MALAU)
The US Justice Department will criminally charge Boeing with fraud over two fatal crashes involving 737 MAX jets and ask the planemaker to plead guilty or face a trial, two people familiar with the matter said on Sunday (Jun 30).
A Lion Air aircraft crashed into the Java Sea off Indonesia shortly after take-off in October 2018, killing all 189 people aboard.
About five months later in March 2019, an Ethiopian Airlines flight also went down soon after taking off. A total of 157 people died.
The Justice Department is pushing Boeing to plead guilty, according to several people who heard federal prosecutors detail a proposed offer on Sunday.
Boeing will have until the end of the coming week to accept or reject the offer, which includes a financial penalty and imposition of an independent monitor to audit the company's safety and compliance practices for three years, the sources said.
The Justice Department decided to charge Boeing after finding it violated a 2021 agreement that had shielded it from prosecution over the fatal crashes involving two 737 MAX jets. Prosecutors alleged at the time that Boeing misled regulators who approved the 737 Max and set pilot-training requirements to fly the plane. The company blamed two relatively low-level employees for the fraud.
Justice Department officials told family members of victims about the plea offer during a video call on Sunday.
The family members, who want Boeing to face a criminal trial and pay a US$24.8 billion fine, reacted angrily. One said prosecutors were gaslighting the families; another shouted at them for several minutes when given a chance to speak.
“We are upset. They should just prosecute,” said Massachusetts resident Nadia Milleron, whose 24-year-old daughter, Samya Stumo, died in the second of two 737 Max crashes. “This is just a reworking of letting Boeing off the hook.”
Prosecutors told the families that if Boeing rejects the plea offer, the Justice Department would seek a trial in the matter, meeting participants said.
Boeing and the Justice Department declined to comment.
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The plea deal would take away the ability of US District Judge Reed O’Connor to increase Boeing’s sentence for a conviction, and some of the families plan to ask the Texas judge to reject the deal if Boeing agrees to it.
“The underlying outrageous piece of this deal is that it doesn’t acknowledge that Boeing’s crime killed 346 people,” said Paul Cassell, one of the lawyers for victims’ families. “Boeing is not going to be held accountable for that, and they are not going to admit that that happened.”
Sanjiv Singh, a lawyer for 16 families who lost relatives in the October 2018 Lion Air crash off Indonesia, called the plea offer “extremely disappointing.” The terms, he said, “read to me like a sweetheart deal".
Another lawyer representing families who are suing Boeing, Mark Lindquist, said he asked the head of the Justice Department’s fraud section, Glenn Leon, whether the department would add additional charges if Boeing turns down the plea deal. “He wouldn’t commit one way or another,” Lindquist said.
A conviction could jeopardise Boeing’s status as a federal contractor, according to some legal experts. The company has large contracts with the Pentagon and NASA.
However, federal agencies can give waivers to companies that are convicted of felonies to keep them eligible for government contracts. Lawyers for the crash victims’ families expect that would be done for Boeing.
Boeing paid a US$244 million fine as part of the 2021 settlement of the original fraud charge. The Justice Department is likely to seek another, similar penalty as part of the new plea offer, said a person familiar with the matter who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing case.
The Justice Department gave no indication of moving to prosecute any current or former Boeing executives, another long-sought demand of the families.
It is also unclear what impact a plea deal might have on other investigations into Boeing, including those following the blowout of a panel from the side of a Boeing Max 9 during an Alaska Airlines flight in January.
