BP gets slick in trying to undermine gulf oil spill settlement

[unhappycamper]

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-hiltzik-20140221,0,1294413.column



The 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill caused “immense environmental damage” along the Gulf Coast, including harm to this oil-drenched pelican.

BP gets slick in trying to undermine gulf oil spill settlement
By Michael Hiltzik
February 23, 2014, 5:00 a.m


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But in recent months BP has mounted a frontal assault on the settlement. The firm has placed full page ads in major newspapers, ridiculing supposedly fraudulent claims blithely paid by the settlement administrator, Louisiana lawyer Patrick Juneau — including $8 million to "celebrity chef" Emeril Lagasse.

Last week BP turned up the heat by sponsoring the daily Playbook web page and email blast aimed at Washington opinion makers, among many other people, by the Politico news website. Each day's Playbook message from BP pinpoints a different, ostensibly absurd case with the tag line, "Would you pay these claims?" Sample: a $173,000 award to an "adult escort service." (What, an escort service can't be harmed by a fall-off in tourism?)

But that's just the PR side of things. The company also has mounted an intensive legal attack on Juneau in federal court in Louisiana. It has obtained a restraining order preventing further payments for the moment and is seeking a permanent injunction so that the policies governing the settlement awards can be recrafted.

BP is going down this path at a time when one would expect it to display maximum agreeability and contrition. The company is negotiating with federal agencies to end its more than year-old exclusion from new government contracts, dating back to its guilty plea. A lawsuit by the federal government and several states, seeking billions of dollars in damages, is before the same federal judge overseeing the class-action settlement. Reports are still emerging of the toxic effects of the spilled oil on the ecosystem; the latest being a just-released finding by Stanford researchers that the crude is bad for the cardiac health of tuna. (BP asserts that the lab study bears no relation to the "real-world conditions" experienced by fish in the gulf.)