Stephen Baldwin has sued fellow actor Kevin Costner over their investments in a device that BP used in trying to clean up the massive Gulf of Mexico oil spill.
The federal lawsuit filed in New Orleans on Wednesday by Baldwin and a friend claims Costner and a business partner duped them out of their shares of an US$18 million deal for BP to purchase oil-separating centrifuges from a company they formed after the April 20 spill.
BP ordered 32 of the centrifuges, which separate oil from water, and deployed a few of the devices on a barge in June. BP capped the well in July and kept any more oil from leaking until the seafloor gusher was permanently sealed in September.
Photo: AFP
Costner’s publicist, Arnold Robinson, declined to comment Thursday on the suit’s allegations.
Baldwin and his friend, Spyridon Contogouris, owned shares in Ocean Therapy Solutions, the company that marketed the centrifuges to BP.
But Baldwin and his friend claim they were deliberately excluded from a June 8 meeting between Costner, his business partner Patrick Smith and a BP executive, Doug Suttles. At the meeting, the suit says, Suttles agreed to make a US$18 million deposit on a US$52 million order for the 32 devices.
Baldwin and Contogouris said they didn’t know about the deal when, three days later, they agreed to sell their shares of the company for US$1.4 million and US$500,000, respectively.
Baldwin and his friend say they were entitled to part of BP’s deposit. Instead, their suit claims Costner “schemed” to use money from BP’s deposit to buy their shares in the company.
Also parting ways are Hollywood A-listers Scarlett Johansson and Ryan Reynolds, who filed for divorce Thursday citing irreconcilable differences, a week after they announced their amicable split, documents showed.
The couple — named sexiest man and woman alive in separate polls in recent years — both filed papers the same day to dissolve their two-year marriage, according to the documents obtained by the TMZ celebrity news Web site.
The legal documents, filed at the Los Angeles Superior Court, gave the date of separation as Dec. 14 — the day they announced their split — and ticked the box citing “irreconcilable differences” as the reason.
The couple did not sign a pre-nuptial agreement before their September 2008 wedding, TMZ reported, citing sources as saying that Ryan made more money than the US actress during their marriage.
Property rights have yet to be determined, according to the court papers.
Johansson, 26, famous for roles in films such as Lost in Translation and Vicky Cristina Barcelona, had said in press reports that being apart from Canadian star Reynolds due to filming schedules was hard on a relationship.
“We entered our relationship with love and it’s with love and kindness we leave it. While privacy isn’t expected, it’s certainly appreciated,” the couple said in a statement announcing their separation last week.
In case Reynolds, 34, is crushed, he shouldn’t have too hard a time finding a date: he was named People’s “Sexiest man alive” two weeks before they announced their split.
Known for films such as X-Men Origins: Wolverine, the Canadian actor is starring in an upcoming silver screen version of the comic classic Green Lantern.
In other celebrity news, Chinese director Zhang Yimou (張藝謀) has chosen Christian Bale to star as a heroic priest in his next film about the infamous Nanjing massacre by Japanese forces.
The filmmaker — known for martial arts blockbuster Hero and for directing the opening ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Olympics — made the announcement at a press conference in the Chinese capital on Wednesday.
“I was impressed with Bale’s versatility and professionalism,” Zhang said, according to the China Daily.
“I believe, by his performance, the film will reach a global audience who will learn more about what happened that year in China.”
In late 1937, Nanjing — then the country’s capital — fell to the Japanese army. China says 300,000 people were killed in an orgy of murder, rape and destruction, and the incident has haunted Sino-Japanese relations.
Some conservative historians in Japan dispute the number killed.
Bale, the 36-year-old Wales-born star of The Dark Knight and Batman Begins, first earned international attention at the age of 13 for his role in Steven Spielberg’s World War II epic Empire of the Sun, set in Shanghai.
In Zhang’s film, tentatively titled Nanjing Heroes and based on a novel by Yan Geling (嚴歌苓), Bale will play an American priest who shelters 13 prostitutes and female students at a Nanjing church as Japanese troops pillage the city.
Last week Joseph Nye, the well-known China scholar, wrote on the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s website about how war over Taiwan might be averted. He noted that years ago he was on a team that met with then-president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁), “whose previous ‘unofficial’ visit to the US had caused a crisis in which China fired missiles into the sea and the US deployed carriers off the coast of Taiwan.” Yes, that’s right, mighty Chen caused that crisis all by himself. Neither the US nor the People’s Republic of China (PRC) exercised any agency. Nye then nostalgically invoked the comical specter
Relations between Taiwan and the Czech Republic have flourished in recent years. However, not everyone is pleased about the growing friendship between the two countries. Last month, an incident involving a Chinese diplomat tailing the car of vice president-elect Hsiao Bi-khim (蕭美琴) in Prague, drew public attention to the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) operations to undermine Taiwan overseas. The trip was not Hsiao’s first visit to the Central European country. It was meant to be low-key, a chance to meet with local academics and politicians, until her police escort noticed a car was tailing her through the Czech capital. The
April 15 to April 21 Yang Kui (楊逵) was horrified as he drove past trucks, oxcarts and trolleys loaded with coffins on his way to Tuntzechiao (屯子腳), which he heard had been completely destroyed. The friend he came to check on was safe, but most residents were suffering in the town hit the hardest by the 7.1-magnitude Hsinchu-Taichung Earthquake on April 21, 1935. It remains the deadliest in Taiwan’s recorded history, claiming around 3,300 lives and injuring nearly 12,000. The disaster completely flattened roughly 18,000 houses and damaged countless more. The social activist and
Over the course of former President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) 11-day trip to China that included a meeting with Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leader Xi Jinping (習近平) a surprising number of people commented that the former president was now “irrelevant.” Upon reflection, it became apparent that these comments were coming from pro-Taiwan, pan-green supporters and they were expressing what they hoped was the case, rather than the reality. Ma’s ideology is so pro-China (read: deep blue) and controversial that many in his own Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) hope he retires quickly, or at least refrains from speaking on some subjects. Regardless