Exxon

WASHINGTON -- Antitrust officials at the Federal Trade Commission have notified state officials that they intend to recommend the approval of Exxon's $81 billion acquisition of Mobil next week, state officials said yesterday. The move came after the companies agreed to the largest divestiture in the commission's history.The centerpiece of the agreement which emerged this week requires the sale of about 2,400 gas stations, about 15 percent of the two companies' retailers around the nation.

DALLAS -- Exxon Corp.'s plan to create the largest publicly traded oil company with an $88 billion buyout of Mobil Corp. was overwhelmingly approved yesterday by both companies' shareholders.Exxon said 99.2 percent of shares voted by its shareholders were cast in favor of the merger. Mobil said 98.3 percent of its shares voted were cast for the buyout. The companies held separate shareholder meetings yesterday at hotels in Dallas, near Exxon's headquarters in Irving, Texas.The two companies announced the buyout Dec. 1 as oil prices were at historic lows and industry profits were plunging.

BEAUMONT, Tex. -- To an outsider, the two refineries seem almost identical, two huge expanses with thousands of employees and multiple towers piercing the flat landscape like some sort of industrial forest. And both fly three flags at their entrances -- the stars and stripes of the nation, the Lone Star banner of this proud state and a third one that clearly distinguishes one world from the other.Here, the flag bears the flying red horse of Mobil. Some 60 miles west on Interstate 10, that banner features the crossed-Xs of Exxon.

NEW YORK -- U.S. stocks, led by oil shares, rose yesterday amid speculation that Exxon Corp.'s talks to buy Mobil Corp. will spark more mergers. A rally in computer shares such as Microsoft Corp. and Internet stocks sent the Nasdaq Composite Index to its first record since July 20.The possibility of an Exxon-Mobil combination "is going to start merger mania again," said Tim Chesterfield, who helps manage $2.65 billion at Pavilion Asset Management in Brighton, England. Chesterfield said he owns Exxon and may buy more oil stocks.

Private planes along the East Coast -- including hundreds at small airports in Maryland -- are temporarily grounded while Exxon officials recall aviation fuel that failed a specification test.Officials from the Federal Aviation Administration were quick yesterday to emphasize that the fuel problem was not connected to the recent crashes of two airplanes and a police helicopter that claimed two lives and injured several other people."There is no safety risk with the fuel being recalled," said James Peters of the FAA. "The only effects are long term, and that is reflected in the voluntary status of the groundings."

Baltimore County's strict new sign law -- in effect less than three weeks -- has snared pennants, flags, portable signs and three huge orange tigers.Using the law to combat the visual clutter along county roads, inspectors have caught almost 170 violators, and those are but a small sample of illegal signs on the streets, officials say. "It's overwhelming," said Raymond S. "Rick" Wisnom Jr., chief of the county's code inspections and enforcement division.While...

An article in Friday's Howard County edition of The Sun tTC mischaracterized actions taken by the county Board of Appeals in considering plans for a combination gas station, convenience store and fast-food restaurant at Gorman Road and U.S. 1. It also misidentified the source of concerns about the proximity of the facility to the highway and the reason the matter was subject to the board's approval.According to Donna Thewes, secretary to the administrative assistant to the board, no one appeared at the board meeting to testify against the proposal, but board members discussed several issues extensively before granting approval -- including expressing concerns about the effect of its lighting on motorists.

WASHINGTON -- The Supreme Court ruled unanimously yesterday that the owner of a cargo vessel that runs aground after pulling away from its moorings cannot force others to share the blame, if errors by the vessel's own captain caused the grounding.The justices upheld a lower-court ruling that the captain's mishandling of a drifting vessel, causing its loss, absolves the maker of the gear that failed and set the ship adrift.Yesterday's decision arose from the 1989 loss of the Exxon Houston, a 72,000-ton, 766-foot oil tanker that hit an undersea coral reef off Oahu in Hawaii.

A handful of neighbors told the Howard County Board of Appeals last week that they are worried about plans to demolish Bill's Ranch Exxon in Ellicott City and construct a new facility.The new Exxon on Montgomery Road near Long Gate Center would be a more modern building with a canopy, eight gas pumps and a convenience store. The gas station would no longer employ a full-time mechanic and would abandon its bay facility.Residents fear the gas station and convenience store would increase traffic and that the lighting from the station's canopy would reflect onto neighboring properties.

Joseph Heimbold Sr., 83, who is credited with creating Exxon's "tiger in the gas tank" marketing campaign, died Wednesday in Neptune, N.J.Keying on Exxon's tiger mascot, he cut a tiger tail from a stuffed animal, stuck it on his gas tank cover and drove to Exxon's corporate headquarters in the early 1960s.The company's vice president of marketing loved the idea and gave Mr. Heimbold the right to market tiger tails throughout the United States and Australia.In the 1970s, he created the annual New Jersey Tomato Weigh-In contest after he noticed that gardeners swapped tall tomato tales.

A Circuit Court judge has affirmed the decision of a Baltimore County jury to award $150 million to neighbors of a Jacksonville service station to compensate for damages arising from a leaking underground pipe. But the judge, Maurice W. Baldwin Jr., who presided over the five-month trial in the residents' lawsuit against the station's owner, Exxon Mobil Corp., gave the oil company a small reprieve: He reduced the damages by between $3 million and $4 million, partly by taking into account the money received by four families who were able to sell their properties, and partly by adhering to a cap set by state law for such compensatory damages.

For the past five months, spectators in a Baltimore County courtroom watched as dozens of families who live near a Jacksonville service station that leaked thousands of gallons of gasoline into the community's groundwater made their case against Exxon Mobil Corp. One especially interested onlooker at the trial, which concluded Thursday with a jury awarding $150 million to the plaintiffs, was attorney Theodore M. Flerlage Jr. "It's always interesting to see how another firm addresses a situation," said Flerlage, who is with the Peter G. Angelos law firm.

A jury awarded more than $150 million yesterday to the neighbors of a northern Baltimore County service station, finding Exxon Mobil Corp. liable for the damage caused when thousands of gallons of gasoline seeped into the groundwater from a leaking pipe. The Baltimore County jury's verdict - delivered after five months of testimony and nearly two weeks of deliberations - directs the oil giant to compensate about 90 Jacksonville families for the lost value of their homes. It also requires Exxon to pay for cancer screenings, and it acknowledges the upheaval caused by the huge spill by awarding millions of dollars for emotional distress.

After a 19-week trial, a lawsuit brought against Exxon Mobil Corp. by 300 Jacksonville residents went to the jury yesterday. At stake are potential compensatory and punitive damages worth "several billion dollars," said plaintiffs' attorney Stephen L. Snyder, whose team received a standing ovation from the crowded courtroom after the jury had filed out. Snyder had argued that the 26,000 gallons of unleaded gasoline that seeped into the groundwater from...

At the beginning of a closing statement that he predicted would last the better part of two days, a lawyer representing 300 plaintiffs who are suing ExxonMobil Corp. said yesterday in Baltimore County Circuit Court that their community was "forever changed" by a huge gasoline leak three years ago. The spill, at a service station in Jacksonville, dumped more than 26,000 gallons of regular unleaded gasoline into the groundwater that supplied the area's wells. The plaintiffs, who are seeking at least $1 billion from the oil giant, claim that their physical and emotional health had been damaged and their property values have been ruined.

The e-mail message was written in February 2007, a year after an underground leak at an Exxon gas station in northern Baltimore County fouled wells and hammered property values. After cleanup efforts are completed, "no one will remember Phoenix," the message said, referring to the address of the Jacksonville area where the spill occurred. "Just another notch in the tree of life." Written by an Exxon Mobil Corp. project manager to a colleague, the text was enlarged and projected onto a screen in a Towson courtroom yesterday by Stephen L. Snyder, a lawyer for 309 residents who are suing the oil company for at least $1 billion in Baltimore County Circuit Court.

Exxon profit up record 58 percent for quarter In what will probably be the high-water mark for corporate profits for a while, Exxon Mobil reported yesterday that it broke its own record for the largest quarterly profit ever by a U.S. company, as oil prices hit a record over the summer and gasoline soared well above $4 a gallon across the nation. Exxon and other oil companies have seen their profits soar thanks to rising oil prices, but the last quarter might signal the end of the boom years.

A lawyer for Exxon Mobil Corp. yesterday promised the residents of a Baltimore County neighborhood that the company would "pay money damages to the people who were harmed" by a 26,000-gallon gasoline leak that contaminated the groundwater beneath their homes two years ago. "We want to make it right," the lawyer, James F. Sanders, said at the start of a trial in which 309 plaintiffs are trying to paint the oil giant as a careless steward of its facilities and...

A throng of plaintiffs packed a Towson courtroom yesterday, overflowing into a hallway, to hear the lawyer they had hired make the case that their neighborhood was ruined and their health endangered by the leak from a gas station of thousands of gallons of gasoline. "This is a leak that should not have happened," Stephen L. Snyder, whose firm is representing 300 residents of Jacksonville, said in Baltimore County Circuit Court during opening statements in a trial in which the plaintiffs are collectively seeking $1 billion from Exxon Mobil Corp.

Make Exxon do more to ensure clean water While I am pleased that the state has required ExxonMobil to write a check as a penalty for releasing gasoline into my neighborhood's groundwater, I am disappointed in some of the provisions and omissions in the recent consent decree ("Exxon fined $4 million for gas leak," Sept. 17). The agreement, which requires ExxonMobil to develop a corrective action plan (CAP) for restoring the health of our groundwater, is incredibly vague. It contains no map or other indication of what physical area is covered by the consent decree and no mention of how deep the restoration of groundwater quality must go. The CAP is subject to review and approval only by the Maryland Department of the Environment.