25th Sep 2014 05:56
LONDON (Alliance News) - A federal judge in New Orleans rejected Wednesday British oil giant BP PLC's request for recouping millions of dollars of overpayments made to some claimants under the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill settlement.
The oil giant found that it ended up overpaying the victims of the oil spill after the court revised the method for calculating the damages. It claimed that the families and companies were reportedly allowed to inflate their losses by the administrator in charge of processing the claims.
At a court hearing in New Orleans, US District Court Judge Carl Barbier earlier in the day heard out attorneys for BP and claimants before reaching the decision. BP will reportedly appeal the decision.
The explosion at the Deepwater Horizon rig, which occurred in April 2010, ruptured BP's Macondo oil well in the Gulf of Mexico, killing 11 workers and triggered the worst offshore oil spill in US history. BP has been fighting hard for the past four years to limit the compensation related to the spill. The oil spill of about 200 million gallons impacted beaches and the fishing sector.
The US government had also sued the rig's owner Transocean Ltd. (RIG), and contractor Halliburton Co. (HAL), but legal proceedings led to BP taking the blame for the accident.
Subsequently, BP reached a USD7.8 billion settlement in business claims, which it now believes that several companies inflated.
In early March 2014, a US Court of Appeals had turned down a request by BP to stop businesses from recovering money over the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, even if the claimants could not link their economic losses to the incident. BP had requested the court for a permanent injunction preventing certain payments under the Economic and Property Damages Settlement it reached in 2012.
According to a Bloomberg report, BP had requested for the recouping of USD185 million of overpayments it made to 208 of the total of 793 claimants.
Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX
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