Texaco Fires Executive, Disciplines 3 Others

Workplace: The four had attended the secretly taped 1994 meeting where racially charged language was used.

By: THOMAS S. MULLIGAN
TIMES STAFF WRITER

The four people Texaco disciplined were those who attended a secretly taped 1994 meeting at which they discussed hiding or destroying evidence in a job-discrimination lawsuit brought by black Texaco employees.

Texaco, headquartered in White Plains, N.Y., said it based its actions on the findings of the outside attorney it hired to investigate the situation.

The company said it submitted lawyer Michael Armstrong's final report to the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, whose criminal probe has so far resulted in obstruction-of-justice charges against one of the four executives.

Texaco said it agreed not to make the report public after prosecutors told the firm that releasing it "would interfere with the government's ongoing investigation."

The tape transcripts caused a storm of outrage when they became public in November because of the racially charged language used by some of the executives and their seemingly cavalier attitude about concealing internal documents and other information considered potentially damaging in the lawsuit.

Fired was J. David Keough, assistant corporate treasurer at the time of the pivotal meeting and more recently an officer of a Texaco insurance subsidiary.

Peter Meade, then-director of cash management in the Texaco finance department and currently a fuel marketing executive, has been suspended without pay for two weeks "and will attend a sensitivity and interaction training program upon his return," Texaco Chairman Peter I. Bijur said in a letter to employees released Wednesday.

The retired employees to whom Texaco cut off benefits are Robert W. Ulrich, the corporate treasurer who was the highest-ranking executive at the taped meeting, and Richard A. Lundwall, then a senior personnel manager in the finance department.

It was Lundwall who secretly recorded the meeting and who turned over his tapes to the lawsuit plaintiffs last fall, shortly after learning that his job was being eliminated in a corporate reorganization. Lundwall was arrested Nov. 19 on federal charges of obstruction of justice for his alleged role in concealing and shredding documents sought by the plaintiffs.

Lundwall is cooperating with investigators, according to a report by the New York Times on Tuesday. Neither he nor the other three executives could be reached for comment on Wednesday.

Meade's lawyer, Stephen Lewis, told Bloomberg News that Texaco had earlier given his client "a clean bill of health."

He said Meade was not present during the portion of the meeting where destruction of records was discussed but was there when some disparaging remarks were made about black holidays and songs.

"My personal belief was that Mr. Meade was in the wrong place at the wrong time," Lewis said.

Bijur said the disciplinary action was taken because it determined that the four "clearly violated the company policy and code of conduct guidelines." He added, "I do not believe the actions of these four individuals in any way reflect upon the values, beliefs and behavior of the 27,000 men and women of our company."

Texaco reacted to the disclosure of the tapes with a litany of corporate mea culpas, culminating in the firm's Nov. 15 agreement to settle the suit for $115 million in cash plus other concessions that brought the estimated cost of the pact to $176 million--believed to be a record in a job-discrimination case.

The case also fueled a national debate on racial policy in the workplace and cast a spotlight on lawsuits brought against numerous other large companies that, lacking the spectacular evidence of the Texaco tapes, might otherwise have been little noted by the media.

Copyright (c) 1997 Los Angeles Times