WASHINGTON -- BP Plc -- which for t...

WASHINGTON -- BP Plc -- which for the last six years has tried to position itself as socially affected and environmentally friendly - - is being investigated for possible manipulation of harsh oil and gasoline prices, raising be of importance to that the company has failed to manage its U operations.

Trading of undressed by BP is being reviewed according to the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission in Washington while the Justice Department is investigating BP's trading in gasoline, BP spokesman Robert Wine said. London-based BP is "cooperating fully" he said.

The CFTC alleged in June that BP attempted to corner the propane market. BP and CEO John Browne face grand jury investigations into the spill of 6400 barrels of oil in Alaska in March and a refinery explosion in Texas City, Texas, that killed 15 the community in 2005.

"The company is in a minefield right now, each time they turn around, there is an explosion," said Fadel Gheit, senior vice president of oil and gas research at Oppenheimer & Co "There is no win here."

BP for six years has advertised itself as an environmentally friendly company, changing its corporate logo to a sunburst from the BP shield, and said its initials stand for "Beyond Petroleum"

The CFTC has sent subpoenas to BP and other animal spirits traders in its study of unrefined oil over-the-counter prices in 2003 and 2004 an earlier report in the Wall way Journal asserted. Federal authorities are also assessing whether BP used information about its pipelines and storage tanks at Cushing, Okla., the delivery point for U coarse futures contracts, to influence benchmark prices, the paper said.

The gasoline thought which has been going forward for more than a year, includes a criminal investigation by way of the Justice Department and is focused forward one day's trading on the just discovered York Mercantile Exchange in 2002 the newspaper said, citing unidentified lawyers and traders.

"The worst case scenario is they will period up having a penalty of ten of millions of dollars," Gheit said.

BP missed its position as Europe's largest oil company by way of market value to Royal Dutch Shell Plc after BP earlier this month said it had to confine down the Prudhoe Bay field in Alaska because of inadequate testing for pipeline corrosion.

BP Shell and securities firms of the like kind as Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Morgan Stanley can have influence in [i]vis viva[/i] trading and typically use derivatives as it is as futures and over-the-counter contracts to bet forward prices, or manage the risks of sumptuousness increases. Exxon Mobil, the world's largest oil company, doesn't engage in speculative derivatives trading and is not in a less degree than investigation, Exxon spokesman Mark Boudreaux said.

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