Jan 15, 2017
More than 100 jailed for fake BP oil spill claims
More than 100 people have been jailed for making fraudulent oil spill claims against BP, highlighting the scale of fraud the energy group faced as it tried to contain damage over the US's largest environmental disaster in 2010. BP has paid out billions of dollars in compensation claims over the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. BP's first compensation mechanism, the Gulf Coast Claims Facility, paid more than 220,000 claimants, and by the end of last year a further 153,000 claims had been paid out under a settlement agreed with plaintiffs' lawyers in 2012. BP announced last July that it had drawn a line under the total costs for the spill, putting the total for stopping the leak, cleaning up the oil, criminal and civil penalties, damages, and compensation at about $62bn before tax. In 2013 BP estimated that it was paying out up to $100m per week in fraudulent claims, and complained that the programme administering payments under the settlement was not putting enough resources into detecting and preventing fraud.
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