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.
The problem with Marx’s famous remark that history repeats itself, first as tragedy, the second time as farce, is that the first time is usually farce as well. This week Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chair Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) made a pilgrimage to the People’s Republic of China (PRC) “to confer, converse and otherwise hob-nob” with Chinese Communist Party (CCP) officials. The visit was an instant international media hit, with major media reporting almost entirely shorn of context. “Taiwan’s main opposition leader landed in China Tuesday for a rare visit aimed at cross-strait ‘peace’”, crowed Agence-France Presse (AFP) from Shanghai. Rare!
What is the importance within the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) of the meeting between Xi Jinping (習近平), the leader Chinese Communist Party (CCP), and Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文), the leader of the KMT? Local media is an excellent guide to determine how important — or unimportant — a news event is to the public. Taiwan has a vast online media ecosystem, and if a news item is gaining traction among readers, editors shift resources in near real time to boost coverage to meet the demand and drive up traffic. Cheng’s China trip is among the top headlines, but by no means
Sunflower movement superstar Lin Fei-fan (林飛帆) once quipped that the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) could nominate a watermelon to run for Tainan mayor and win. Conversely, the DPP could run a living saint for mayor in Taipei and still lose. In 2022, the DPP ran with the closest thing to a living saint they could find: former Minister of Health and Welfare Chen Shih-chung (陳時中). During the pandemic, his polling was astronomically high, with the approval of his performance reaching as high as 91 percent in one TVBS poll. He was such a phenomenon that people printed out pop-up cartoon
The town of Jhihben (知本) in Taitung County is most well-known for its hot springs, but if you’re looking for an interesting nearby daytime excursion to complement an evening soak at your hotel, don’t miss the Jhihben National Forest Recreation Area (知本國家森林遊樂區). From the resort area, simply take Bus 8129 down to the last stop at the end of the main road and then walk across the bridge and turn left for the ticket gate. This bus can also be taken right from the Taitung Bus Station or from the Zhiben TR station, and runs approximately once an hour all day
RSS