📎 Source Note: Transparency is essential in journalism. The facts and figures presented in this article are derived directly from the legal filings in this case. A copy of which can be found at the bottom of this article. We encourage readers to review the primary source document for themselves.

Corporate Misconduct Case Study: Khera Petroleum, LLC & Its Impact on Public Safety

TL;DR: At a gas storage facility in Tupelo, Mississippi, Khera Petroleum, LLC held approximately 2,400 barrels of gasoline without a legally required plan to prevent or contain a spill. A 2022 federal inspection revealed a stunning list of safety failures, including cracked containment walls, a lack of integrity testing on storage tanks, and untrained employees. The facility’s location meant a discharge could contaminate a chain of waterways leading directly to the Gulf of Mexico. Despite these systemic failures that jeopardized public health and the environment, Khera settled with the Environmental Protection Agency for a civil penalty of just $1,000, while never admitting to the factual allegations.

Read on to understand the full scope of the alleged misconduct and what it reveals about a system that often values profit far more than protection.

Introduction: A Ticking Time Bomb in Tupelo

In Tupelo, Mississippi, a facility storing nearly 2,400 barrels of gasoline operated as a potential environmental disaster waiting to happen. Khera Petroleum, LLC, the owner of the facility on South Gloster Street, was found by federal inspectors to have no written plan to prevent a catastrophic spill. This was a fundamental breakdown in the most basic safety protocols required to handle vast quantities of hazardous materials.

The facility’s own location amplified the danger. A discharge of oil could travel just 3,000 feet before entering Kings Creek, a waterway that flows into the Tombigbee River and, eventually, the Gulf of Mexico. The case of Khera Petroleum is a grim illustration of a broader systemic failure, one where corporate negligence is enabled by weak regulatory enforcement and a capitalist framework that incentivizes cutting corners for the sake of the bottom line. It reveals a system where the profits are privatized, but the risks are socialized, left for communities and the environment to bear.

Inside the Allegations: A Pattern of Willful Neglect

The core of the case against Khera Petroleum lies in a damning inspection conducted by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) on February 23, 2022. What the inspectors discovered was not a facility struggling with minor compliance issues, but one with a wholesale disregard for the foundational rules of oil pollution prevention. Khera Petroleum was operating without a Spill Prevention, Control, and Countermeasure (SPCC) Plan, a document legally mandated for any facility that, due to its location, could reasonably be expected to discharge oil into the nation’s waters.

This single failure was the gateway to a cascade of other violations. Without a plan, there was no framework for safety. Inspectors found that bulk storage containers were not being tested or inspected for integrity according to industry standards. The very walls meant to contain a spill were compromised, with visible holes, cracks, and voids. Records of inspections, tests, and dike drainage events were simply not kept, leaving a black hole where a history of safety diligence should have been.

The neglect extended to every facet of the operation. Effluent treatment systems, like oil-water separators, were not frequently inspected to prevent a discharge. Mobile and portable containers lacked the required secondary containment. Critical pipe terminal connections were not marked to show their origin, nor were they capped when out of service, creating an ongoing risk of a breach. The failures painted a picture of a company operating with shocking indifference to the potential consequences of its business.

Timeline of Systemic Failure

Date	Event	Significance
February 23, 2022	EPA Inspection Conducted	Federal inspectors uncover numerous, fundamental violations at the Khera Petroleum facility, including the complete absence of a required Spill Prevention, Control, and Countermeasure (SPCC) Plan.
December 9, 2024	Respondent Signs Consent Agreement	Sukhjit Kaur, the owner of Khera Petroleum, signs the agreement, consenting to a civil penalty without admitting to the federal government’s factual allegations.
April 30, 2025	EPA Signs Consent Agreement	Keriema S. Newman, a director at the EPA, signs the agreement, formalizing the settlement from the agency’s side.
June 11, 2025	Final Order Issued	A Regional Judicial Officer ratifies the agreement, officially concluding the legal proceeding and ordering Khera Petroleum to pay the whopping $1,000 penalty.

Regulatory Capture and the Illusion of Oversight

The case of Khera Petroleum is a powerful critique of a regulatory system hollowed out by neoliberal ideology. The governing laws, like the Clean Water Act, exist on paper to prevent the exact kind of negligence alleged in Tupelo. Yet, the outcome of this case—a mere $1,000 civil penalty—demonstrates a profound disconnect between the law’s intent and its real-world application. Such a trivial fine essential functions as a predictable cost of doing business.

This scenario is a hallmark of regulatory capture, where the rules become so weak or enforcement so lax that they pose no meaningful threat to a company’s profit-driven behavior. For a corporation, the economic calculation is simple: the cost of comprehensive compliance, including engineering reviews, integrity testing, and employee training, is a guaranteed expense. The cost of non-compliance, however, is a mere possibility, a risk that a company might be willing to take, especially if the potential penalty is financially insignificant.

The settlement itself is a tool that favors the corporation. Khera Petroleum was allowed to resolve the matter while neither admitting nor denying the EPA’s findings. This legal maneuver allows Khera Petroleum to avoid public accountability and any admission of wrongdoing that could be used in future lawsuits, all while correcting the violations behind closed doors. The system, in effect, prioritizes a quiet resolution over a public reckoning, shielding the corporation from the full consequences of its actions.

Profit-Maximization at All Costs

At its core, the array of safety failures at the Khera Petroleum facility points to a single, overriding objective: the maximization of profit at the expense of public and environmental safety. Every alleged violation can be traced back to a decision to avoid costs. Preparing and implementing a proper SPCC Plan requires investing in engineering expertise. Regularly testing storage tanks and pipelines requires spending on specialized labor and equipment. Training employees in spill prevention protocols means allocating resources to non-revenue-generating activities.

This is the logic of late-stage capitalism in its rawest form. Safety is not treated as a moral or social obligation but as a line item on a budget that can be minimized or eliminated. Khera Petroleum failed to properly support its aboveground piping, provide liquid level alarms for its tanks, and protect its buried pipes from corrosion. Each of these failures represents a calculated financial decision, a choice to save money today while offloading the immense potential cost of a disaster onto the community of Tupelo and the downstream ecosystems.

The lack of trained oil-handling personnel is particularly revealing. It suggests a business model where even the human element of safety is sacrificed for savings. An untrained worker is not only a danger to themselves but is incapable of properly responding to an emergency, transforming a small leak into a major environmental catastrophe. This approach prioritizes immediate financial gain over long-term stability and responsible stewardship.

The Economic Fallout: Socializing Risk, Privatizing Profit

The $1,000 penalty assessed against Khera Petroleum is a rounding error, a figure so small it borders on the absurd when contrasted with the potential cost of an oil spill. A significant discharge into Kings Creek and the Tombigbee River would trigger a multi-million-dollar cleanup operation, the costs of which would ultimately be borne by the public through federal and state emergency funds. The economic damage would extend to local fishing, tourism, and property values, creating a ripple effect of financial devastation.

This dynamic is a classic example of how neoliberal capitalism socializes risk while privatizing profit. Khera Petroleum benefited financially from every corner it cut. By avoiding the costs of compliance, Khera Petroleum increased its operating margin. Yet, the financial risk associated with a potential spill was transferred to the public. The community, the state, and the federal government were left holding a massive, unfunded liability for a disaster they had no role in creating.

Furthermore, the legal document includes provisions for what happens if Khera Petroleum fails to pay its meager fine. The government can refer the debt to a collection agency, withhold money from federal payments owed to Khera Petroleum, or even suspend its business licenses. The irony is palpable: the system has more robust mechanisms to collect a $1,000 penalty than it does to prevent the corporate behavior that created the risk in the first place.

Environmental and Public Health Risks on the Gulf Coast

The threat posed by the Khera Petroleum facility was not abstract. It was a direct menace to a fragile chain of ecosystems vital to the American South. The facility’s stockpile of 2,380 barrels of gasoline, a substance defined as “oil” under the Clean Water Act, created the potential for a “harmful” discharge. Under federal law, a harmful discharge is one that violates water quality standards or simply causes a visible “film or sheen” upon the water’s surface.

A spill from the Tupelo facility would have followed a predictable and destructive path. Drainage from the site flows directly to Kings Creek, described in the legal filing as a “relatively permanent water.” From there, the toxic plume would travel to Town Creek, then the Tombigbee River, which connects to the Mobile River before emptying into the Gulf of Mexico. This entire network of waterways, crucial for both wildlife and human communities, was put at risk.

The public health implications are just as severe. Gasoline contains a cocktail of toxic chemicals, including benzene, a known carcinogen. A spill could contaminate drinking water sources, expose residents to harmful fumes, and destroy natural habitats. The EPA’s findings that Khera Petroleum failed to regularly inspect its oil-water separators and maintain its containment dikes show that the barriers designed to protect the public were neglected and likely ineffective. The risk was actively courted through systemic inaction.

Exploitation of Workers as a Business Model

The federal government’s finding that Khera Petroleum failed to properly train its oil-handling personnel reveals a deeper layer of corporate misconduct. In a system driven by profit-maximization, workers are often the first cost to be cut, and their safety is treated as disposable. Sending untrained employees to manage thousands of barrels of a hazardous, flammable substance is a profound act of exploitation.

Untrained workers are placed in an impossible position. They are tasked with responsibilities they are not equipped to handle, endangering their own health and lives. In the event of a pipe rupture or tank failure, they would lack the knowledge to execute a safe and effective emergency response, increasing the likelihood of injury and escalating the scale of the environmental damage. This practice creates a two-tiered system of risk, where owners and managers are insulated from danger while frontline workers bear the immediate physical consequences of corporate cost-cutting.

This failure is a direct violation of the CWA’s implementing regulations, which mandate specific training and spill prevention briefings. The law recognizes that human error, often stemming from a lack of training, is a primary cause of industrial accidents. By allegedly ignoring this requirement, Khera Petroleum not only violated federal law but also abandoned its fundamental duty of care to its employees, treating their well-being as secondary to its financial interests.

Community Impact: A Neighborhood Held Hostage

For the residents of Tupelo, Mississippi, the Khera Petroleum facility represented a hidden threat embedded within their community. The fact that a spill could travel just over half a mile before contaminating a public waterway means that the immediate neighborhood was the first line of defense, and the first potential victim.

The consent agreement reveals that drainage from the facility moves down-gradient for 3,000 feet before reaching Kings Creek. This means any uncontained spill would first flow across or under nearby land, potentially contaminating soil and groundwater long before it reached the river system. The community was living alongside a significant environmental hazard without any assurance that Khera Petroleum responsible for it had taken even the most basic precautions.

This situation erodes the social contract between industry and community. Businesses are expected to operate safely and responsibly, without jeopardizing the health and property of their neighbors. When a company fails as comprehensively as Khera Petroleum did, it breaks that trust. It holds the local community hostage to its own risk-taking, forcing residents to live with a threat they did not create and cannot control. The $1,000 settlement does nothing to repair this broken trust or compensate the community for the years it may have lived under the shadow of a preventable disaster.

The PR Machine: How to Settle Without Admitting Guilt

The resolution of the Khera Petroleum case is a masterclass in corporate reputation management, executed through the legal system itself. The core of this strategy lies in the Consent Agreement and Final Order (CAFO), a document that allows the company to end the legal action without ever admitting fault. While the EPA lays out nine specific, damning failures discovered during its inspection, Khera Petroleum was permitted to “neither admit nor deny the factual allegations.”

This is a powerful public relations tool. It enables Khera Petroleum to publicly frame the incident as a mere disagreement over complex regulations, rather than a wholesale failure to protect the public. By signing the agreement, Khera Petroleum certifies that it is currently in compliance with the law. This cleverly reframes the issue as a problem that has already been solved, drawing attention away from the period of alleged neglect and the danger it posed.

Furthermore, the settlement resolves the company’s liability for federal civil penalties for these specific violations. It effectively wipes the slate clean for a nominal fee, insulating the corporation from further financial or legal jeopardy related to these past actions. The entire process prioritizes a quiet, tidy conclusion over a transparent, public admission of the risks that were imposed on the people of Tupelo.

Wealth Disparity and Corporate Greed

The civil penalty of $1,000 stands as a monument to the staggering imbalance in how our system values corporate assets versus public health. Khera Petroleum’s facility had the capacity to store 2,380 barrels of gasoline, a commodity worth hundreds of thousands of dollars on the open market. The penalty for failing to implement even the most basic safety plans for this massive stockpile amounts to less than the market value of three barrels of gasoline.

This is the math of corporate greed, where potential profits are weighed against the minuscule cost of getting caught. The fine is basically a business expense, one so low it could incentivize similar negligence elsewhere. It reflects a society where the potential for immense corporate profit is protected, while the environment and the lives of ordinary people are assigned a shockingly low monetary value.

The document details how the company waived its right to contest the allegations or appeal the final order, a move that speaks not of contrition, but of economic convenience. For the price of a used laptop, Khera Petroleum made a federal enforcement action disappear, demonstrating a system of accountability that is fundamentally broken and skewed in favor of corporate wealth.

Global Parallels: A Pattern of Predation

The failures at Khera Petroleum are not an isolated incident confined to rural Mississippi. They are a local manifestation of a global pattern of corporate behavior fostered by decades of deregulation and the relentless pursuit of profit. Across the world, in industries from oil extraction and chemical manufacturing to mining and agriculture, a similar logic prevails: safety regulations are treated as obstacles to be overcome or ignored, not as fundamental social responsibilities.

This pattern is a predictable feature of late-stage capitalism. In developing nations, multinational corporations often exploit weak environmental laws to operate in ways that would be illegal in their home countries. In developed nations, the same objective is achieved through lobbying for deregulation and starving regulatory agencies of the funding needed for robust enforcement.

The outcome is always the same. Corporations externalize their costs, pushing the environmental and health burdens onto communities that lack the political power to fight back. Whether it’s a pipeline leak in the Niger Delta, a factory fire in Bangladesh, or a neglected gasoline depot in Tupelo, the underlying story is one of a system that consistently prioritizes corporate interests over human life and ecological stability.

Corporate Accountability Fails the Public

The legal proceeding against Khera Petroleum ultimately represents a profound failure of corporate accountability. The final order resolves the company’s liability, but no individual is held responsible for the decisions that led to the documented safety failures. The owner of the limited liability company signed the agreement, but the penalty is assessed against the corporate entity, shielding the decision-makers behind the legal fiction of the corporation.

This outcome is a feature, not a bug, of our legal system. It allows those in positions of power to preside over dangerous and negligent operations while facing minimal personal risk. The settlement allows Khera Petroleum to continue its business, its legal status and ownership unchanged by the enforcement action. The message this sends is clear: even when caught, the consequences for putting a community at risk are negligible.

The public is left with a sense of deep injustice. A federal inspection revealed a facility poised for potential disaster, yet the resolution feels more like a clerical correction than a serious sanction. True accountability would involve penalties that are proportionate to the potential harm, liability that extends to the individuals in charge, and a system that prevents companies with a history of neglect from continuing to operate as if nothing happened.

This Is the System Working as Intended

It is tempting to view the case of Khera Petroleum as a failure of the system—a loophole that allowed a bad actor to escape meaningful consequences. This perspective, however, misunderstands the nature of the system itself. Under the logic of neoliberal capitalism, the outcome in Tupelo is the system working exactly as it was designed to.

The priority is the protection of capital and the minimization of regulatory burdens on business. A $1,000 fine for operating without a spill prevention plan is not a mistake. It is the result of a decades-long political project to redefine the role of government from a protector of the public good to a facilitator of corporate activity. Enforcement actions become performative, creating the appearance of oversight without imposing costs that might meaningfully alter corporate behavior.

The language of the legal document itself, with its focus on voluntary settlement and clauses that prevent an admission of guilt, is crafted to ensure the smoothest possible path for the corporation. The system successfully identified a problem, processed it through its bureaucratic channels, and resolved it with minimal disruption to the business. The public and environmental risks were merely externalities in a process focused entirely on legal and economic efficiency.

Conclusion: A Quiet Settlement for a Loud Danger

The case of Khera Petroleum, LLC is a quiet document that tells a loud and alarming story. It speaks of a facility filled with gasoline, perched at the top of a waterway leading to the Gulf of Mexico, operating without the most fundamental safety precautions. It tells of cracked containment walls, untested tanks, and untrained workers. It is a story of immense risk imposed on a community for the sake of private profit.

But the final chapter of the story is perhaps the most disturbing. It is a tale of a legal system that processed these alarming facts and produced a penalty of just $1,000, allowing Khera Petroleum to walk away without ever admitting to the danger it created. This is a mirror reflecting our society’s broken priorities.

This legal battle was never just about one facility in Tupelo. It illustrates a deep and pervasive failure in how our economy and government protect corporations over communities, profit over people, and convenience over precaution. Until the penalties for negligence are greater than the profits of neglect, stories like this one will continue to be written, not in court documents, but in the headlines of the next preventable disaster.

Frivolous or Serious Lawsuit?

This legal action was profoundly serious and legitimate. The case was initiated by the United States Environmental Protection Agency, the federal body charged with enforcing the Clean Water Act. The agency conducted a physical inspection and documented numerous, clear-cut violations of federal regulations designed to prevent catastrophic oil spills.

The complete absence of a legally mandated Spill Prevention, Control, and Countermeasure (SPCC) Plan is a foundational failure of public safety. The documented physical decay of the facility—cracked dikes, untested tanks, unsupported pipes—posed a direct and substantive threat to the environment and the community of Tupelo. The potential for a spill to contaminate waterways all the way to the Gulf of Mexico made the matter one of significant national interest. This was a necessary and justified enforcement action aimed at addressing a clear and present danger.

EPA Khera Petroleum, Tupelo, MS, CAFO 6-11-25 CWA-04-2024-1106(b)Download

if it tickles your fancy then you may kindly visit this link on the EPA’s website: https://yosemite.epa.gov/OA/RHC/EPAAdmin.nsf/Filings/0C627F9E9140F79485258CA6006FA41F/%24File/Khera%20Petroleum,%20Tupelo,%20MS,%20CAFO%206-11-25%20CWA-04-2024-1106(b).pdf

You can also visit this link for some required bedtime reading: https://today.westlaw.com/Document/I096dab405da311f09707ae712ee75a62/View/FullText.html?

💡 Explore Corporate Misconduct by Category

Corporations harm people every day — from wage theft to pollution. Learn more by exploring key areas of injustice.

💀 Product Safety Violations — When companies risk lives for profit.
🌿 Environmental Violations — Pollution, ecological collapse, and unchecked greed.
💼 Labor Exploitation — Wage theft, worker abuse, and unsafe conditions.
🛡️ Data Breaches & Privacy Abuses — Misuse and mishandling of personal information.
💵 Financial Fraud & Corruption — Lies, scams, and executive impunity.

NOTE:

This website is facing massive amounts of headwind trying to procure the lawsuits relating to corporate misconduct. We are being pimp-slapped by a quadruple whammy:

The Trump regime's reversal of the laws & regulations meant to protect us is making it so victims are no longer filing lawsuits for shit which was previously illegal.
Donald Trump's defunding of regulatory agencies led to the frequency of enforcement actions severely decreasing. What's more, the quality of the enforcement actions has also plummeted.
The GOP's insistence on cutting the healthcare funding for millions of Americans in order to give their billionaire donors additional tax cuts has recently shut the government down. This government shut down has also impacted the aforementioned defunded agencies capabilities to crack down on evil-doers. Donald Trump has since threatened to make these agency shutdowns permanent on account of them being "democrat agencies".
My access to the LexisNexis legal research platform got revoked. This isn't related to Trump or anything, but it still hurt as I'm being forced to scrounge around public sources to find legal documents now. Sadge.

All four of these factors are severely limiting my ability to access stories of corporate misconduct.

Due to this, I have temporarily decreased the amount of articles published everyday from 5 down to 3, and I will also be publishing articles from previous years as I was fortunate enough to download a butt load of EPA documents back in 2022 and 2023 to make YouTube videos with.... This also means that you'll be seeing many more environmental violation stories going forward :3

Thank you for your attention to this matter,

Aleeia (owner and publisher of www.evilcorporations.com)

Also, can we talk about how ICE has a $170 billion annual budget, while the EPA-- which protects the air we breathe and water we drink-- barely clocks $4 billion? Just something to think about....