"U.S. And 5 Gulf States Reach Historic Settlement with BP to Resolve Civil Lawsuit over Deepwater Horizon/ Macondo Well Oil Spill
/The United States and the five Gulf states have announced a settlement to resolve civil claims against BP arising from the April 20, 2010 Macondo well blowout and the massive oil spill that followed in the Gulf of Mexico. This global settlement resolves the governments’ civil claims under the Clean Water Act and natural resources damage claims under the Oil Pollution Act, as well as remaining economic damage claims of the five Gulf states and local governments. Taken together this global resolution of civil claims is worth more than $20 billion, and is the largest such settlement with a single entity in the Department’s history.
The United States has lodged in U.S. District Court a proposed, federal-and-state Consent Decree, in which BP will pay a Clean Water Act penalty of $5.5 billion (plus interest), $8.1 billion in natural resource damages (this includes $1 billion BP already committed to pay for early restoration), up to an additional $700 million (some of which is in the form of accrued interest) to address injuries to natural resources that are presently unknown but may come to light in the future and adaptive management, and $600 million for other claims, including claims under the False Claims Act, royalties, and reimbursement of natural resource damage assessment costs and other expenses due to this incident.
