BP has been cleared to implement the medical-benefits portion of its £5.5billion Macondo settlement with residents along the Gulf of Mexico coastline.
The go-ahead comes after a court rejected a bid by some residents who claimed the previously agreed accord did not provide enough compensation.
They had appealed a lower court’s approval of BP’s 2012 settlement of most private damage claims as “substantively unfair” to the estimated 200,000 victims who risk long-term health effects from chemical exposure from the spill.
The dismissal of the medical-benefit claims clears one of the last roadblocks to BP’s resolution of spill-related claims by most private parties, although the British supermajor still faces claims for damages suffered by state and local governments, casinos, financial institutions and companies harmed by the Obama administration’s moratorium on deep-water drilling that followed the spill.
BP pleaded guilty in January 2013 to 11 counts of felony seaman’s manslaughter, two pollution violations and one count of lying to Congress in connection with the April 2010 Macondo well blowout and explosion that killed 11 workers and set off the worst offshore spill in U.S. history.
The firm agreed to pay £2.6billion in related criminal and civil penalties, and still faces as much as £10billion in additional pending fines related to violations of the U.S. Clean Water Act.
The appellants had complained that victims with the same injuries were treated differently under the accord, and that lawyers negotiating the deal traded away the interests of some victims to win greater benefits for other victims.
BP and lawyers leading the spill litigation urged the appeals court to dismiss the challenge, claiming the plaintiffs had no legal right to sue because they had not filed medical- injury claims under the settlement.
When a lower-court judge agreed that the victims were not proper members of the settlement class, the plaintiffs voluntarily dropped their claims. The U.S. Court of Appeals in New Orleans on Feb. 11 dismissed the claims at their request.
This appellate challenge to BP’s medical-benefits settlement is separate from other appeals against different aspects of BP’s overall economic-damages settlement. In one of those appeals, spill victims failed to overturn the court order approving BP’s economic-loss accord.
In other pending appeals, BP and some spill victims have challenged various settlement interpretations that the company says are inflating payments to claimants whose damages were improperly calculated or can’t be directly traced to the spill.
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