BP has asked an American court to dismiss the court-appointed lawyer administrating compensation payments to people affected by the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill after accusing him of failing to declare a conflict of interest.
The oil company’s attempt to remove Patrick Juneau is the latest salvo in an aggressive campaign to stop and claw back what it claims are billions of dollars in improper payouts for “fictitious” losses arising from the spill.
In a filing to the US District Court in New Orleans, BP alleges that Mr Juneau represented the state of Louisiana against it before he was appointed to lead the court-supervised settlement programme for compensating spill victims.
BP claims that Mr Juneau failed to get a written waiver for this conflict of interest and that he was wrong to tell a judge last year that he “didn’t have any involvement in anything in the spill”, given that he had “personally executed” a retainer agreement between his law firm and the state of Louisiana to provide “advice and counsel . . . related to the claims process” and that he had acted “as an aggressive advocate for Louisiana claimants’ interests”.
“In a moment, he went from being an advocate for claimants to an adjudicator of their claims, not the ‘neutral’ that this position requires,” Geoff Morrell, of BP, said.
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Although Mr Juneau was appointed in 2012, BP was unwilling to explain why it had chosen to bring up the “new” information about his alleged conflict of interest now.
Halliburton, one of the contractors working with BP during the Deepwater Horizon disaster, yesterday agreed to pay $1.1 billion to residents, businesses and local authorities in the Gulf of Mexico to settle claims. BP accused Halliburton of carrying out a “bad job” when it tried to seal the abandoned Macondo well with concrete in April 2010.