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[Thirty] years after a vicious winter storm ripped across the Atlantic Ocean and helped sink the world's largest and most advanced oil rig, memories of the Ocean Ranger tragedy are still painful and fresh. All 84 crew members died when the Ocean Ranger toppled and then sank on the Grand Banks in the early hours of Feb. 15, 1982. "It's still — the way it happened, there's no closure. It doesn't feel like there's any," said Connie Foley, who was 19 when her father Ron and his colleagues died at sea...

A huge oil-drilling rig reportedly sank in a storm off the coast of Newfoundland Monday morning, and all 84 men aboard were said to be missing in 50-foot seas and feared dead... (Page A8.)

Once thing's for sure. Mitt Romney didn't send his money down to the Cayman Islands to work on its tan. The former Massachusetts governor has been criticized by some for having some of his vast fortune in the Caribbean offshore banking center. Yes, it was politically clumsy. But it was not uncommon, and -- assuming he has filed all the right disclosures -- it was perfectly legal. But if you're not running for president, and don't have to worry about public relations, what are the legitimate reasons for moving money offshore? I spoke to Jim Duggan, a partner at Chicago...

Switzerland is in the unfortunate position of being bullied and harassed by the U.S. government. The crux of the problem is that the United States arguably has the world's worst tax system for international activity, and this creates conflict with other nations, particularly ones that have good tax laws that attract investment. This has resulted in a number of different attacks against Swiss sovereignty. On the multilateral front, the Obama Administration is actively supporting the anti-tax competition project of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. On the unilateral front, the United States is imposing onerous laws on the entire...

It's the billion-dollar question in Alaska for 2012: Will this be the year Shell Oil begins large-scale offshore exploratory drilling in Arctic waters? Two months into 2012, the oil giant is beyond the lead time it said it needed to assemble the flotilla of support vessels that must accompany drill ships to leases in the remote Chukchi and Beaufort seas. But Shell Alaska Vice President Pete Slaiby remains hopeful drilling can begin when Arctic Ocean ice melts this summer, even as he awaits a green light from regulators. "There is clearly more certainty with the regulatory process than we've had...

I'm live at Freedom Fest's Global Financial Summit 2012 in the Bahamas. Trevor Bradley of Georgetown Trust joins me to discuss global banking jurisdictions. Georgetown Trust specializes in helping you obtain asset protection, management, and diversification. All of their work is offshore and is protected with respect to privacy and confidentiality. Trevor and I agree, Belize is one of the best banking jurisdictions out there. Belize has never had a banking failure in its history, and banks in Belize are regulated to keep a 24% liquidity rate all year round. You need to consider offshoring a portion of your wealth....

The Obama campaign and Democrats see the revelations about Mitt Romney’s offshoring as a boost to their central case: That Romney is the walking embodiment of the reckless, unfettered, profits-at-all costs capitalism that caused the crisis and helped rig the economy against the middle class, in favor of the rich. They will argue that Romney’s private sector conduct is a preview of the priorities, philosophy and view of capitalism that he’d bring to the presidency. On a conference call with liberal bloggers just now, Obama campaign officials sketched out the case they’ll be making about Romney’s Bain days, his offshoring,...

Throughout the months-long 2010 BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, scientists expressed surprise at the development and relatively speedy disappearance of giant plumes of subsea oil and gas that jetted from the wellhead and refused to surface. A new study explains how bacteria degraded the plumes so efficiently: A succession of hydrocarbon-noshing species mushroomed because their movable feasts were repeatedly replenished. Only about 15 percent of the BP gusher floated up to form giant surface slicks, a second new study finds. Natural gas constituents and dissolvable chemicals amounting to twice that mass remained near the seafloor, creating the...

Today, I’m going to say some nice things about BP and some not so nice things about the lawyers who are suing BP. Please don’t spill your coffee. As horrific as the Deepwater Horizon accident was in April 2010 — killing 11 rig employees, while pouring millions of gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico — BP has performed quite admirably in its aftermath. It has spared no expense in cleaning up the oil. It has set aside $1 billion to restore the environment and coastal ecosystem. It underwrote an advertising campaign to lure tourists back to the Gulf...

Standing in front of a brightly coloured, 3-D image of the geology far below the floor of the Chukchi Sea, Steve Phelps pointed to the “giant opportunity” that has prompted Shell to pour billions of dollars into the Alaska Arctic. “Burger — that’s the name you are going to get to know,” Phelps recently told reporters gathered here to learn about the huge oil company’s plans and promises for Alaska. Phelps is Shell’s Alaska exploration manager, a geologist whose job it is to find big oil. The Burger field, part of a Shell naming theme that revolved around junk food,...

4 Dead, 49 Missing After Arctic Oil Rig Sinks18 December 2011 By Khristina Narizhnaya At least four people died when the floating Kolskaya oil rig overturned and sank with 67 people on board in the stormy Sea of Okhotsk as it was being towed to shore, 200 kilometers off Sakhalin Island. Fourteen people survived with minor injuries and 49 were reported missing late Sunday, the Transportation Ministry said. Four survivors were flown to the Nogliki Airport on Sakhalin Island. The Kolskaya, owned by state-owned offshore drilling company Arktikmorneftegazrazvedka, was being transported to Sakhalin after testing the Pervoocherednaya deep-sea oil well....

SAO PAULO—A Brazilian federal prosecutor on Wednesday asked a judge to shut down all Chevron Corp. and Transocean Ltd. operations in Brazil in a lawsuit that seeks some 20 billion Brazilian reais ($11 billion) in damages from the companies, the latest legal broadside to the firms since oil leaked from a well they operate in early November. In a statement announcing the lawsuit, the prosecutor's office in Campos, a city in Rio de Janeiro state, said Chevron and Transocean "showed a lack of planning and environmental management," by allowing the leak, which authorities say allowed at least 2,400 .

Environmentalists have opened a new front in their campaign to block Shell’s planned drilling in Arctic waters near Alaska, by challenging the government’s decision to issue the company essential air pollution permits for some of the work. At issue are Clean Air Act permits the Environmental Protection Agency issued last month for Shell Oil Co.’s Kulluk drillship and support vessels, which the firm plans to use while working on exploratory wells in the Chukchi and Beaufort seas starting next summer. Ten Alaskan and environmental groups appealed those permits before the EPA’s administrative Environmental Appeals Board on Monday. That builds on...

Energy Policy: Killing the Keystone XL pipeline may help one of the world's richest men get richer. North Dakota's booming oil fields will now grow more dependent on a railroad the president's economic guru just bought. Stop us if you see a pattern here. About the time George Soros — Hungarian billionaire and key donor to leftist groups and the Democratic Party — invested heavily in the stock of the state-run Brazilian oil company Petrobras, President Obama was curbing U.S. offshore oil production and the U.S. Export-Import Bank announced a $2 billion loan to Petrobras to finance deep-water drilling off...

Shell Oil Company has broken its previous record for the world’s deepest underwater well, the company announced today. A well in the Gulf of Mexico has set a global record for oil production in deep water, Shell Oil Co. said Thursday. Shell says it is producing oil from a well 9,627 feet below the surface of the Gulf, a depth more than six times greater than the Empire State Building’s height. It exceeds by 271 feet the depth of the previous record-holder, also a Shell project in the Gulf. Both wells operate through the Perdido drilling and production platform, 200...

The Obama administration is paving the way for seismic surveys of the Atlantic Ocean that will reveal the amount of oil and natural gas that exist off the East Coast, a top Interior Department official said Tuesday. Speaking at the Platts Energy Podium, Bureau of Ocean Energy Management Director Tommy Beaudreau said the department is conducting an environmental review of the surveys and should release a draft of that review by next summer. The seismic surveys "will play a tremendous part in informing future decisions about whether or not the resource potential in that area is such that leasing activity...

Oil industry leaders and their Capitol Hill allies complained Tuesday that the Obama administration’s plan to hike the minimum bid for offshore drilling leases and shorten the duration of those contracts will discourage companies from making bets on marginal fields in the Gulf of Mexico and ultimately curb domestic energy production. At issue is the Interior Department’s decision to boost the minimum bid companies must offer for deep-water tracts from $37.50 per acre to $100, while simultaneously shrinking the length of most of those leases from 10 to seven years. The move is designed to spur companies to diligently develop...

Department of the Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and Bureau of Ocean Energy Management Director Tommy P. Beaudreau announced that BOEM will hold the first oil and natural gas lease sale in the Gulf of Mexico since the Deepwater Horizon accident in 2010. This oil and natural gas sale, Sale 218, trails BOEM’s completion of a supplemental environmental impact statement analyzing the effects of the Deepwater Horizon spill on the western Gulf of Mexico. The last lease sale, WPA Gulf of Mexico Lease Sale 215, was cancelled on May 27, 2010. The Department of Interior said the cancellation allowed time to...

A bipartisan coalition of lawmakers today blasted the Obama administration for not doing more to block offshore drilling off the island nation’s coast. “We are extremely concerned over what seems to be a lack of a coordinated effort by the administration to prevent a state sponsor of terrorism . . . from engaging in risky deep-sea oil drilling projects that will harm U.S. interests as well as extend another economic lifeline to the Cuban regime,” the lawmakers, which are all of Cuban descent, said in a letter to President Barack Obama. The letter signers, Reps. David Rivera, R-Fla., Mario Diaz-Balart,...

The federal government today approved BP’s plans to drill new deep-water wells in the Gulf of Mexico, signing off on a broad offshore exploration plan for the first time since the lethal blowout of the company’s Macondo well last year. Federal regulators at the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management okayed the British oil company’s revisions to a previously approved drilling plan for its Kaskida prospect about 192 miles off the Louisiana coast. The move expands BP’s government-approved 2008 plan to drill up to five wells at the site by allowing the company to drill two more wells and change the...