A U.S. prosecutor said in court today that government experts will show BP is overstating how well it mitigated the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill, and that the company shouldn’t get much of a break on $13.7 billion in potential fines merely for complying with the law.
“We’re not here to say BP did a bad job in the response action—they didn’t,” Justice Department attorney Steven O’Rourke told a federal judge in New Orleans in opening statements to kick off the penalty phase of BP’s oil spill trial, which will continue for three weeks.
O’Rourke said only responses to Hurricane Katrina and the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks were comparable in size and intensity to the response to the Deepwater Horizon disaster. But while it was the biggest environmental response in U.S. history, he said, it “wasn’t necessarily the best response action ever.”
As FuelFix.com reports, U.S. prosecutors and BP’s attorneys gathered in a New Orleans courtroom today for the first day of the third and final phase of a trial combining much of the civil litigation arising from the spill. In this round, U.S. District Judge Carl Barbier is taking testimony to determine how much BP will pay in environmental penalties for its role in the disaster.
BP hopes to convince Barbier to slash its fines while government lawyers say the judge should reduce the fines by no more than $2 billion should he choose to curtail them at all. The company should pay at least $11.7 billion, O’Rourke said.
“The penalty is going to have to be high enough for companies of their size to even notice it, but not high enough to be ruinous to their operations,” O’Rourke said in his opening statement. “It has to be high enough so massive companies like Anadarko and BP will be deterred.” Read the full story.
