Roger Parloff at Fortune answers some frequently asked questions. Last week he wrote about the supposed, but largely irrelevant, $75 million “cap,” in actuality, according to one expert, a provision of a law “designed to expand liability.” Earlier here.
P.S. From the WSJ (paywall):
Under all but the most dire situations, BP should have little trouble servicing its debts. The biggest risk to the company is a government-driven collapse, but experts doubt the U.S. government can carry out its harshest threats, such as forcing BP to pay the salaries of workers laid off because of the federal moratorium on deepwater drilling. “I cannot imagine that the U.S. government has anything close to the authority to do that” says Jim Langdon, executive partner at the law firm of Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld.
4 Comments
Until there is an independent public enquiry (some hope), nobody knows what this American crew did on this American made rig to cause the blow-out which was not stopped by the faulty American made blow-out preventer, whilst drilling in a non PB preferred area insisted on by the American regulators, but lets look at it this way:
Because of the 3000 or so innocent women and children killed by American funded IRA terrorism in Britain over forty years, at the time of 7-11 most fair-minded Brits observed the justice in the fact that America had simply ‘got one back’. Now in so many places that America has left irreversibly polluted like The Niger Delta, Bhopal, a lot of the South American coast and so many other places, perhaps the rest of the world is now saying that America has simply ‘got one back’.
America should be paid exactly what it has given for clearup in the rest of the world i.e. $0.
Since when has the Obama Whitehouse worried about mere about mere trifles such as having legal authority to do anything it wants?
[…] As Walter Olson points out, President Obama’s assertion that he is going to make BP pay for all of the costs of its […]
Mr. Pleasant testified that he reduced the pressure on the lower annulus from 1900 to 1500 (about 11 min. in).
http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/id/225193
His testimony is riveting.