Rose Law Group Reporter Gripe of the Week
By Phil Riske | Managing Editor
A patron in a New Orleans restaurant tells the waiter, “I’ll have the Number 6 shrimp plate, hold the oil.”
It’s been three years since British Petroleum’s Deepwater Horizon accident that discharged nearly 5 million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico off the southern shores of Louisiana and neighboring states.
One doesn’t have to watch much TV to have seen the barrage of BP commercials portraying the energy company as voluntarily restoring the Gulf, where tourism again abounds and the shrimp is safe to eat.
“Two years ago, the people of BP made a commitment to the Gulf, and every day since, we’ve worked hard to keep it,” says a BP manager in one of ads. “BP has paid over $23 billion for people in businesses who were affected and to pay for their cleanup costs.
Actually, BP has offered a payout of a little over $3 billion to cover losses of the 162,000 claimants. A settlement calls for $8.5 billion.
In April a federal judge on rejected BP’s request to block what could be billions of dollars in settlement payouts to businesses that claim the company’s 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico cost them money.
The oil company is claiming it has had to pay hundreds of millions of dollars to businesses that exaggerated or invented losses from the 2010 disaster.
The company recently set up a hotline for reporting fraudulent claims relating the the Gulf oil spill. According to BP, callers can receive a reward if the claim they report leads to an indictment, recovery of money or denial of a claim. BP also placed full-page ads in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and The Washington Post last month that accused lawyers and politicians of encouraging businesses to submit dishonest claims.
At the end of one of BP’s Were the Good Guys ads, Fred Lemond, BP operations manager, looks into the camera and says, “Today, our commitment to the Gulf and to America has never been stronger.”
Yada, yada, yada.
