The former chief financial officer and former vice president of accounting and reporting at Canadian oil and gas company Penn West Petroleum have settled charges for their role in an accounting fraud scheme that spanned several years, the Securities and Exchange Commission announced Tuesday.
In June 2017, the SEC had charged Penn West Petroleum (now doing business as Obsidian Energy) with fraudulently moving hundreds of millions of dollars in expenses from operating expense accounts to capital expenditure accounts. “Penn West was one of the largest oil producers in Canada, but historically struggled to keep its operating costs—a key financial metric that the investing public looks to when evaluating the financial health of an oil and gas company—under control,” the SEC complaint stated.
