BP wants a federal judge to cap its potential oil-spill pollution fines at a maximum of $12.3 billion, a move that would cut away nearly a third of the penalties U.S. prosecutors are seeking for the Deepwater Horizon disaster. FuelFix.com reports the British oil giant argued in court papers Friday that the judge, in determining its fines, should disregard the higher penalties in U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and Coast Guard regulations because, it claimed, neither agency has the authority to raise maximum penalties above Congress’s $3,000-per-barrel cap for environmental liabilities under the Clean Water Act.
Pollution fines are set to be the central issue in January of the third and final phase of BP’s ongoing civil trial over the 2010 Gulf oil spill. Prosecutors have said BP could o we up to $18 billion per EPA rules that trigger fines up to $4,300 per barrel of spilled oil. The Coast Guard has set fines at $4,000 per barrel.
On Friday, BP urged U.S. District Judge Carl Barbier in New Orleans to set a maximum $3,000-per-barrel penalty before the so-called penalty phase begins next year, or risk legal errors seeping into his future determinations on the fines.
“It cannot be the law that 20 or more federal agencies all simultaneously possess the power to inflate the civil penalty amounts,” BP wrote. “That would be a recipe for legal chaos.”
But that’s what the EPA and the Coast Guard have done, BP said, even though only the U.S. attorney general has the power to raise maximum penalties. The law, BP said, renders those agencies’ rules invalid. Read the full story.
