The New York Times' Campbell Robertson and John Schwartz report today on why BP is now attacking a settlement process for economic-damage legal claims arising out of the Gulf oil spill. The energy firm, however, has not been able to unwind the settlement it agreed to: "While BP has won some arguments in court, its fundamental point — that the settlement has been brazenly misinterpreted to pay claims with no evidence linking them directly to the spill — was batted away in a recent decision in the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. 'There is nothing fundamentally unreasonable about what BP accepted,” Judge Leslie H. Southwick wrote, 'but now wishes it had not,'" The Times also reports.
The settlement allows for payouts for false positives in which businesses can show loss in income, even it was not related to the oil spill, The Times reports. Texas attorney Brent Coon told The Times BP "'underestimated how much law firms would go out and solicit clients. I cannot believe they didn’t appreciate that risk.'"
Lawyer and Legal Journalist
