NEW ORLEANS (AP) - An executive from the company that was BP's cement contractor on the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig says he learned of some "irregularities" in tests that the contractor's employees performed after the massive 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
Timothy Probert, a Halliburton president who served as the company's safety chief at the time of the spill, didn't specify the nature of those irregularities when he testified Monday at a federal trial in New Orleans designed to assign fault to the companies involved in the deadly disaster.
But a plaintiffs' attorney who questioned Probert claimed Halliburton employees conducted "off-the-record" tests and didn't record some test results because they feared how they could affect litigation spawned by the nation's worst offshore oil spill.
Probert testified as the trial entered its third week.
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