Oil giant BP will be dragged back to court after an appeals court over securities fraud claims after an oil spill in Alaska.
The company, already mired in litigation over the 2010 Macondo disaster, had previously had fraud claims dismissed by a judge in the US over the Prudhoe Bay spill in 2006.
Around 200,000 gallons of oil spilled from a BP pipeline into the Alaskan tundra in March 2006.
The company was fined $20million at the time, but two years later a group of shareholders filed a class action lawsuit against BP saying its bosses had made false statements about the incident.
At the time a judge in Seattle dismissed the bid, but last night the Appeals Court gave the shareholders the go-ahead to bring them again after ruling enough evidence had been provided to back up some of the claims.
“In this case, facts alleged in the complaint support the conclusion that BP had been aware of corrosive conditions for over a decade, and yet chose not to address them,” the court said in a written statement.
BP said it was studying the findings, and had made improvements to safety and reliability since the 2006 spill.
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