A federal judge rejected Boeing‘s plea deal tied to a criminal fraud charge stemming from fatal crashes of its 737 Max aircraft.
The court gave Boeing and the Justice Department 30 days to decide how to proceed, according to a court document filed Thursday.
In July, Boeing agreed to plead guilty to a criminal charge of conspiring to defraud the U.S. government by misleading regulators about its inclusion of a flight-control system on the Max that was later implicated in the two crashes â a Lion Air flight in October 2018 and an Ethiopian Airlines flight in March 2019. All 346 people on the flights were killed.
Boeing and the Justice Department didn’t immediately comment.
Victims’ family members had taken issue with a government-appointed monitor as a condition of the plea and called it a “sweetheart deal.
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