Judge Orders BP to Pay $130 Million Fees to Gulf Claims Program.

[elleng]

Source: nyt/reuters

BP Plc must pay $130 million to a court-appointed administrator overseeing payments to thousands of people who claimed they were hurt by the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill, a federal judge ruled on Wednesday, in a fresh legal setback for the oil company.

BP had balked at funding the third-quarter operating budget for the administrator, Louisiana lawyer Patrick Juneau, complaining that his bill contained "excessive costs."

But U.S. Magistrate Judge Sally Shushan in New Orleans ruled that it was "unreasonable" for BP to halt funding.

Fees have topped $560 million since Juneau's team started work in June 2012, shortly after BP reached an agreement with businesses and residents to compensate them for spill-related injuries


Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2013/08/07/business/07reuters-bp-spill-admininstration.html?hp&_r=0

[dipsydoodle]

1. Nice work if you can get.

$560 million for a year's work. Sure beats working at McDonalds.

[Dustlawyer]

2. And 60% of the victims have yet to be paid anything!

BP drafted the class action settlement agreement themselves and now don't like it. If you look at their statements last December at the "Fairness Hearing," it was the next best thing since sliced bread. Now, they make the same objections to it that we made in our brief (my boss was not called upon to speak at the Fairness Hearing even though we represented over 10,000 clients of the 13,000 victims that opted out of the class action)! We find that $75,000,000.00 of the $130,000,000 goes to a small firm, Brown Greer, picked originally by BP for Ken Feinberg's fraudulent, Gulf Coast Claims Facility.
Now BP is making our same arguments, while at the same time paying "journalist" to write false stories about what is really happening. Their line is that they have paid all "legitimate claims" (remember now that they said these magic words on day 1) and that it is "greedy trial lawyers" pushing fraudulent claims. They hired ex-FBI head, Louis Freise, to investigate and have stated that they will come for you to get their money back so that everyone would be scared to pursue their legitimate claims. I am sure he will give a report that backs up BP's bullshit. I do not deny that there has been dishonest people filing fraudulent claims. The issue is that it is still only a fraction of the cases, BP is just trying to manipulate the public opinion towards these victims and delay, deny, and defend to drag this out longer. The longer it goes on, the more victims give up or decide to settle for a fraction of their losses.
BP is the biggest advertiser on the Gulf Coast since the spill to the point that no victim's stories get written or aired. The fishing is spiraling downhill, but this year the tourist have at least come back!