Bloomberg reported that BP Plc has lost its bid yesterday to reconsider its view by the full appeals court that its claims administrator for the victims of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill had misinterpreted the company's $9.2 billion settlement and that it was paying for economic losses that were not caused by the environmental accident. BP was earlier rejected for the same claims by a three-judge panel of the US Court of Appeals in New Orleans.
In April 2010, a blowout of the oil company's deep-water Macondo well resulted to spilling over 4 million barrels of oil into Gulf of Mexico. Aside from BP, owner of the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig that burned and sank, Transocean Ltd, and Halliburton Co. (HAL), which provided cement services for the well, faced thousands of lawsuits over the oil spill.
According to US Circuit Judge Leslie Southwick, BP had agreed to the condition that it would not require claimants to prove that they incurred losses from the spill if the said losses had matched mathematical formulas.
US Circuit Judge Edith Brown Clement also added that accepting this particular interpretation of the claims will allow Patrick Juneau to award payment without regard to whether an injury occurred due to the oil spill. Moreover, Clement said that the acceptance of such interpretation violates the requirements for approving group lawsuits.
"(The settlement approval would) impermissibly extend the judicial power of the United States into administering a private handout program," she said.
Bloomberg said that the appeals court decision would now only leave two options for the London-based company. One option is to concede with paying the alleged "fictitious" claims, or file an appeal to the nation's highest court.
BP spokesman Geoff Morrell said of the latest decision, "BP is disappointed that the full Fifth Circuit will not be considering the divided panel decisions related to the compensation of claims for losses that have no apparent connection to the spill."
