U.S. Offshore Oil Chief Quits 4 Weeks After Rig Blast (Update3)

May 17 (Bloomberg) -- The chief U.S. oversight official for offshore oil drilling resigned today, four weeks after a rig disaster in the Gulf of Mexico that killed 11 workers, sank the vessel and triggered leaks that have spewed millions of gallons of crude into the sea.

Chris Oynes, associate director of the offshore energy and minerals management program for the Interior Department’s Minerals Management Service, has left his job, Bill Lee, an agency spokesman, said in an interview.

Oynes left amid heightened scrutiny of rig-safety inspections and mounting criticism of what President Barack Obama described as the agency’s “cozy relationship” with the energy industry.

“This wasn’t the doing of one, single person, but rather the culmination of a bureaucratic breakdown,” U.S. Representative Darrell Issa, a California Republican, said in an e-mailed statement. “Removing one person might be a start, but MMS is in need of an exhaustive overhaul and comprehensive reform.”

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar announced plans last week to split the minerals service into separate agencies with safety and revenue-collecting duties. The minerals agency is the largest source of U.S. Treasury funds behind the Internal Revenue Service, generating about $13 billion a year.

MMS History

Oynes was elevated to chief of the offshore division in February 2007 after 13 years in charge of the agency’s Gulf of Mexico unit, where he oversaw 50 lease sales and safety inspections for 4,000 oil and natural-gas platforms, according to the Minerals Management Service’s website.

Oynes was promoted by then-MMS Director Johnnie Burton, who quit three months later during a scandal over leases that allowed some energy producers to avoid billions of dollars in royalty payments to the federal government.

Lee said he didn’t know whether Oynes’s departure was voluntary, referring inquiries to the oil-spill response center staffed by employees from the Minerals Management Service, U.S. Coast Guard and BP Plc, which owns the damaged oil well.

Telephone messages left at the Robert, Louisiana, response center and for Nicholas Pardi, a spokesman in the minerals service’s Washington office, weren’t immediately returned. The Washington Post earlier today reported Oynes’s departure.

To contact the reporter on this story: Joe Carroll in Chicago at jcarroll8@bloomberg.net.