Free Republic

Oil executives have been making headlines recently, due to large purchases of their own company’s stock. In fact, insider buying in the oil industry is higher than any other industry, except the machinery industry. Who’s buying? Major insider purchases for the month of March were made by Kinder Morgan (NYSE: KMI) and Diamond Offshore Drilling (NYSE: DO). Diamond Offshore Drilling’s CEO, Corp Loews, purchased 685,373 shares on the open market, and Rich Kinder, CEO of Kinder Morgan, purchased 100,000 shares of Kinder Morgan. In March, Rich Kinder and Corp Loews weren’t the only executives buying company stock. The Director of...

Diamond Offshore said that it will move another of its deepwater rigs from the U.S. Gulf of Mexico later this year to drill wells off Vietnam for BP. When the Ocean Monarch is moved, it will be the third Diamond rig to leave the Gulf of Mexico since BP's deadly Deepwater Horizon explosion in April and the subsequent shut-down of deep-water drilling in U.S. waters. Diamond said in a fleet status report that the Ocean Monarch should conclude its current contract with Marathon, for which the driller earned about $290,000 per day, in mid-August.