The administrator handling compensation claims over the Deepwater Horizon disaster has been ordered to stop settlements to some companies who claim the oil spill cost them money.
US District judge Carl Barbier issued the order last night, after an appeals court reversed his rulings in a dispute between BP and lawyers for those who claimed to have been affected by the 2010 Gulf of Mexico spill.
BP has argued that Patrick Juneau, the court-appointed administrator for the compensation claims, would have caused it to pay billions for false or inflated claims.
Judge Barbier had rejected their bid to block the process, but an appeals court overturned his ruling earlier this week.
Last night the judge said the order to stop payouts applied to any claims in which the “matching of revenues and expenses is an issue”, but did not specify how many claimants could be affected.
Meanwhile the boss of a Scots oil drilling firm has backed BP’s attempts to close off the Macondo well.
Iain Adams, managing director of Aberdeen-based Norwell, had studied the company’s efforts at stopping the well following the blow-out which caused millions of gallons of oil to flood into the Gulf of Mexico in 2010.
“Horrendous as the situation is, it’s always possible to make it even worse,” he told a court in New Orleans, on day four of the second phase of the trial into the Deepwater Horizon disaster.
Mr Adams told the trial that BP had measured the risk of its attempted ‘top kill’ method before trying it, and that the option of putting in place another blowout preventer on top of the already ruptured one at the bottom of the sea would not have been ready in time.
“It was apparent that the BOP-on-BOP was not physically ready before top kill,” he said.
Earlier the company had played deposition videos, including one from Admiral Thad Allen, the national incident commander on the 2010 disaster, who said nobody in the industry had the equipment needed to cap the leaking well on standby.
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