Administrator of Gulf oil spill compensation alleges BP intervention

The administrator of the multi-billion dollar settlement of claims stemming from the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill has claimed that BP is attempting to cut his budgets as part of a wider measure to stop the payment of valid private economic and medical claims.

Lawyers representing Patrick Juneau, the court-appointed administrator for the case, have presented papers opposing BP's move to cut $45 million from the office's $131 million fourth-quarter budget.

"The point will not be lost to any reasonable observer that 'defunding' the settlement programme can have effects almost as devastating as stopping it," Nola.com reports the lawyers as stating.

The filing continued: "Particularly in an atmosphere where BP continues to ask courts to stop or undo the [court-supervised settlement programme], even legitimate actions to curb expense and achieve more efficiency could be viewed as nothing more than an effort to 'slow walk' claims payments while the court battles rage on."

Mr Juneau says that although BP maintains that more needs to be done with less money, he notes that more than 150,000 claimants are currently prevented barred from pursuing their claims against BP in return for a right to participate in the programme.

"They have no other recourse or remedy," he said, adding that BP's demands must be levelled against a claims backlog that totals more than 88,000.

As of last week, 207,310 claims has been received by the programme, of which 119,301 had been processed.

Of these, 56,299 were declared eligible for payment and 46,490 were denied, while there have been 4,038 appeals of claims decisions, of which 79 per cent were filed by BP.

According to the filing, the claims administrator's office budget was based upon the CAO's "fully supported and reasonable estimate" of the staffing levels necessary to keep the backlog rates of claims at present levels.

Mr Juneau also argued that BrownGreer and other companies working for the claims office were not only selected and approved by both BP and attorneys representing the claimants, but that BP helped to negotiate their payment rates.

In response, BP has conducted an extensive public relations campaign in support of its position that the claims programme is being operated improperly, and that fraud is occurring in the payments process - something it highlighted in the publication of a full-page advertisement in the New York Times this week.