A US-based law firm representing families of victims of the 2019 Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 Max plane crash, is seeking up to 58 billion USD in compensation.
This comes as the law firm Ribbeck Law Chartered (RLC) “vehemently objects” a new plea agreement between Boeing and the US Department of Justice, “on behalf of its clients”.
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On July 24, 2024, the aircraft giant finalized the deal to plead guilty to a criminal fraud conspiracy charge and to pay fines ranging between $243.6 million and $487 million for misleading aviation regulators about software that played a role in the 737 Max crashes.
The fines are a fraction of the $24.8 billion in compensation that the families of the crash victims had initially requested.
“The proposed fine is grossly inadequate and fails to meet the standards set by prior precedents in penalizing corporations for similar egregious conduct,” said Manuel von Ribbeck, Founding Partner at RLC, in the statement issued this week.
The Chicago-based law firm has filed a plea submission at a US District Court to object to the agreement, arguing the compensation amount as too little.
Instead, its lawyers are pushing for dismissal of the plea deal suggesting a fine “that recognizes the value of each of the 346 people killed”.
The law firm seeks a compensation amount of between $47 billion to $58 billion from Boeing. This amount “is more in line with previous criminal fraud cases involving corporate firms,” it argues.
All 149 on board including Ethiopians amongst 35 other nationalities were killed when an ET 737 Max jet headed to Nairobi from Addis Ababa Bole International Airport crashed shortly after take-off on March 10, 2019.
It occurred just less than five months after another plane of the same model crashed into the sea near Indonesia.
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US Investigators later tied both crashes to “deceptive and fraudulent conducts” of the Boeing executives about an automated flight control system in the designing process of the 737 Max plane type.
The decision meant that pilot training manuals lacked information about the system, which overrode pilot commands based on faulty data, forcing the planes to nosedive shortly after take-off.
