BP takes full-page ads in US papers to attack greedy lawyers in oil spill case
BP has taken full-page ads out in America's newspapers to protest that it's being taken advantage of by unscrupulous lawyers and people who were never financially hurt by the massive 2010 oil spill.
BP hits out at payments going to businesses that did not suffer any losses."
The company has spent more than $14 billion on cleanup and and $11 billion on claims since the giant oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. It has also backed the US Olympic team.
But the ad in The New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal, is headlined bluntly: "This isn't the settlement we agreed to."
The ad states: "Last year, we signed a settlement agreement to ensure that people who suffered losses from the accident would keep being paid. When we negotiated that agreement, we sat down in good faith with the goal of helping as many deserving people as possible. And when we signed it that's what we thought the agreement would do. Unfortunately, it's now being applied in a way that ignores the agreement's plain language, with enormous payments going to businesses that did not suffer any losses."
A report from Bloomberg Business Week earlier this summer told of lawyers and clients who had little if any connection to the spill being awarded millions from the settlement fund.
And last month, BP CEO Bob Dudley told CNBC that plaintiff's lawyers were the "biggest beneficiaries" of the agreement.
Yet a federal judge this month ordered the company to pay "more than $130 million to the court-supervised administrator of its multibillion-dollar settlement with Gulf Coast businesses and residents" - although BP said the administrator, Patrick Juneau, didn't provided adequate documentation for the money .
Geoff Morrell, VP and head of U.S. communications for BP, told AdAge: "Today we are working to ensure that our willingness to do the right thing is not taken advantage of and distorted to provide windfalls to undeserving businesses, including law firms.
"We owe it to our shareholders and employees to do so, and we believe everyone should know that the unmooring of this settlement from the express terms of the agreement changes the calculus other businesses will consider when deciding whether to settle or litigate."