It's been more than two years that BP Plc battles to avoid payment of nearly $1 billion as settlement for the oil spill damages that happened six years ago, to seafood processors, Gulf Coast shrimpers and oystermen it claimed didn't exist.
BP Plc is having a hard time maintaining its skyrocketing costs even though it reached a roughly $20 billion deal to settle all state and federal claims and was supposed to close a chapter on the spill.
However, separate lawsuits associated to the Macondo well that blew off the Louisiana coast have balloon the bill further and could pull along for years, showing the enormous level of legal complexity enveloping the spill, according to legal experts.
On Tuesday, the attaching bills accumulated renewed attention when the company reported a $485 million quarterly net loss that was mainly caused by an unexpected $917 million charge mostly linked to a separate settlement with Gulf Coast businesses and residents affected by the spill. Over the past four years, the settlement has inflated by $5 billion, as reported by The Wall Street Journal.
A New Orleans federal judge permitted BP on Monday to dump its bid to prevent paying the second half of $2.3 billion compensation pledged to seafood interests harmed by the blown-out well. In 2010, the disaster spilled 4 million barrels of crude into the Gulf of Mexico blackening shores of five states and closing fishery operations.
The British oil company claimed that lawyers negotiating on behalf of the seafood industry fraudulently increased the number of Southeast Asian immigrant fishermen and boats claiming damages from the spill. The overstatement jacked up BP's settlement by hundreds of millions of dollars, as claimed by the company.
A Texas attorney, Mikal Watts was accused last year for allegedly providing false documents and information by representing more than 40,000 boat captains and crew captains mostly Vietnamese American in spill claims against BP, Bloomberg reported.
The company is expected to start paying off the $20 billion federal settlement later this year having payments averaging to $1.1 billion yearly over a period of 18 years from asset sales, according to Nasdaq.
To date, BP is subjected to legal and cleanup costs of $56.4 billion, including almost $9 billion in government fines and more than $8 billion for cleaning up the environment.
