Court Decision Will Save BP Billions, Party Breaks Out at HQ

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Published
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Long after the Deepwater Horizon disaster, BP PLC (NYSE: BP) continues to battle those who do not believe they were adequately compensated for the fallout. This has moved into the courts. As part of it, a settlement BP reached with lawyers for these aggrieved parties became subject to a fight over how it should be interpreted. The decision in BP’s favor likely will save it billions of dollars in future payment claims.

BP’s comment about the decision well sums up its enthusiasm about the decision:

BP is extremely pleased with today’s ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit setting aside the claims administrator’s interpretation of the business economic loss framework in the settlement agreement BP reached with the Plaintiffs’ Steering Committee last year. Today’s ruling affirms what BP has been saying since the beginning: claimants should not be paid for fictitious or wholly non-existent losses. We are gratified that the systematic payment of such claims by the claims administrator must now come to an end.

As part of today’s decision, the Fifth Circuit has also reversed the District Court’s denial of BP’s motion for a preliminary injunction staying the payment of business economic loss claims under the agreement. The Fifth Circuit has ordered the District Court to “expeditiously craft” an injunction that stays payments to people who did not suffer “actual injury traceable to loss from the Deepwater Horizon accident” until the matter is “fully heard and decided through the judicial process.”

The Fifth Circuit has remanded the matter for further proceedings in the District Court.

The lawyers for the opposition and the opposition itself were not invited to the champagne party at BP’s headquarters. Most of the toasts were to BP’s attorneys. The justices of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit were invited, but apparently could not make it.

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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