Staff Report

Bristow Oil Co. won a $3 million verdict against Exxon Mobil Corp. The Darlington company claimed the oil giant had conspired to drive it out of the Mobil lubricants business and had wrongfully terminated its distributorship.

A jury awarded Bristow Oil $2 million in actual damages and $1 in punitive damages. Family-owned Bristow Oil has been in Darlington since 1912.

“This case was originally filed four years ago, so it has been a long, hard fight,” said Nexsen Pruet attorney Marguerite Willis, who represented Bristow Oil.

The saga began in 1984, when Mobil Oil Corp., now ExxonMobil, asked Bristow to distribute its lubricants.

In the years that followed, Bristow expanded the lubricant business. ExxonMobil responded by regularly renewing the company’s distributorship agreement, and Bristow continued to make the necessary investments to build upon its success.

According to the court case, North Carolina-based White Oil Co., another Mobil distributor that had operations in South Carolina, and ExxonMobil targeted Bristow in late 1998. White Oil expressed an interest in purchasing Bristow but was told the company was not for sale.

White Oil and ExxonMobil proceeded with their plan to remove Bristow from the equation. In spring 2001, ExxonMobil came to Darlington under the guise of extending its contract with Bristow. Instead, it announced it was terminating Bristow’s distributorship, which would turn all of Bristow’s clients over to White Oil.

The jury agreed with the argument that Bristow would have had options in place to save the business had it known ExxonMobil intended to end its 17-year relationship. As such, the jury determined that ExxonMobil had illegally favored White Oil, conspiring to cheat Bristow out of its Mobil lubricants business.