CoolPass: BP may never settle thousands of Gulf Spill claims.

March 3, 2011 - PRLog -- CoolPass has learned from recent media reports that the lawyer appointed by the U.S. administration to handle claims arising from the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico last year said on March 1st that over 100 000 such claims may never be paid.

According to Britain’s The Guardian ““a defensive Ken Feinberg, under fire from the Obama administration, Gulf leaders and local business for the slow pace of payouts for losses due to the BP spill, said the vast majority of the 130,000 unsettled claims may not be paid for as they did not have adequate documentation.”

According to the article the number of claims that may go unsettled may be in the vicinity of 80% of the total.

CoolPass was informed that Feinberg had not ruled out the chance of these claims being settled in the future, but he did emphasize that “the claims that were denied had woeful, inadequate or no documentation to speak of." Because of this, BP would be able to automatically challenge any individual claim of more than $500,000

Under the agreement with the White House, any funds remaining from the $20 billion that BP had set aside for claims resulting from the Deepwater Horizon oil well spill would revert back to the company, Feinberg said.

CoolPass has since learned that the Obama administration, the state governments of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida have all accused Feinberg of delaying claims and creating obstacles to local businesses, and say that the attorney under-estimates losses to local businesses and have approached the courts to order emergency payments.
There is increasing frustration over Feinberg’s handling of the claims process. Since August last year he has paid out almost $3.6 billion to about 168,000 individuals and businesses in the Gulf.

This month a New Orleans judge ordered that Feinberg stop calling himself an independent operator as his firm is paid $850, 000 a month by BP, as remuneration for overseeing the compensation fund.

Feinberg is quoted as having said that the majority of his estimates have been based on the assumption that the Gulf would make a full recovery by the end of 2012, but the fishing and tourism industries that were severely hit by the disaster, claim that it will take significantly longer to recover from the damages to the area, CoolPass sources report.

# # #

We sell the retirement of carbon offsets on your behalf so that they are removed from circulation forever. By retiring the offsets, CoolPass insures that the underlying CO2 is never traded again and that the result is a positive environmental impact.