February 26, 2014 — A Texas lawyer who is the target of a federal probe into whether he grossly inflated the number of clients he represented in the wake of the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill is due in federal court in New Orleans on Wednesday, as BP takes aim at the $2.3 billion deal it brokered to compensate the seafood industry for losses suffered by commercial fishing vessel owners, captains, fishermen and crew members.
In light of the allegations against attorney Mikal Watts, attorneys for BP plan to argue that an anticipated second round of claims payments for losses by the seafood industry should be halted. Watts’ inflated claims resulted in the creation of an oversized $2.3 billion pool, which should instead be capped at the roughly $1 billion already paid out, the company said in a Dec. 17 court filing.
U.S. District Judge Carl Barbier, who is overseeing the civil trial against BP and its partners in the Deepwater Horizon disaster, is scheduled to hear oral arguments Wednesday. Attorneys for Watts also are expected to ask Barbier to put BP’s lawsuit against him on hold until an ongoing criminal investigation over the same allegations is completed.
In the lawsuit filed in December, BP alleges that Watts claimed to represent more than 40,000 clients, which accounted for 88 percent of the anticipated claims for fishing crew members as the settlement was being negotiated. But he eventually filed only 648 claims for deckhands, and the entire number of seafood claims turned out to be far smaller, with 24,250 claims filed in total.
The compensation program for seafood claims is just part of a larger class-action settlement between the British oil giant and the Plaintiffs’ Steering Committee, the group of lawyers who negotiated the pact. The agreement sought to avoid piecemeal litigation by resolving hundreds of thousands of claims for economic damages from what is generally considered the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history.
Read the full story at The Advocate