The US Justice Department will charge Boeing Co. with criminal fraud, leaving the plane maker to choose between pleading guilty or taking the risk of going to trial, according to a Bloomberg report.
Boeing has until the end of the week to decide whether to plead guilty to the charge, the department told the families of victims of two fatal 737 Max crashes and their attorneys in a meeting Sunday, according to the people who asked not to be named discussing a confidential matter.
The department will inform Boeing it will have to pay an additional criminal fine of $243.6 million on top of the $243.6 million already paid with a 2021 deferred-prosecution agreement, bringing the total amount of fine close to $500 million, according to two of the people. The company will also have to hire a corporate monitor for three years, they said.
Paul Cassell, an attorney representing the crash victims’ families, called the offer the department plans to make to Boeing a “sweetheart plea deal.”
“The deal will not acknowledge, in any way, that Boeing’s crime killed 346 people,” he said in an email. “The families will strenuously object to this plea deal.”
The fine the department will seek falls far short of a nearly $25 billion fine the families requested — with the possibility of suspending $14 billion to $22 billion of that if Boeing devotes those funds to an independent corporate monitor and improvements to its safety programs.
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