BP Plc is seeking to undo payments to some victims of the 2010 Gulf of Mexico spill in a move opposing lawyers warn could open the floodgates to challenging hundreds of thousands of individual damage-claim awards.
BP, which is struggling to hold down the estimated $9.2 billion cost of its settlement of most private damage claims, is set to argue today before the U.S. Court of Appeals in New Orleans that the administrator of its settlement program misunderstood the deal. As a result, a handful of nonprofit agencies that didn’t suffer any losses from the spill were paid hundreds of thousands of dollars, BP contends.
