Obama Plans to Force BP ’s Hand on Oil Spill Fund

[Cees Binkhorst]

REPLY TO: D66 at nic.surfnet.nl

Obama vindt dus dat er geen 10+ jaar geprocedeerd moet worden, en sluit
de zaak vrij kort.
Lijkt wel of Putin tegen Shell in Sakhalin een goede les is geweest ;)

Groet / Cees

June 13, 2010
Obama Plans to Force BP’s Hand on Oil Spill Fund
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/14/us/14spill.html
By JACKIE CALMES

WASHINGTON — President Obama for the first time will address the nation
about the ongoing oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico on Tuesday night
and outline his plans to legally force BP executives to create an escrow
account reserving billions of dollars to compensate businesses and
individuals if the company does not do so on its own, a senior
administration official said on Sunday.

“The president will use his legal authority to compel them,” said Robert
Gibbs, the White House spokesman.

Mr. Gibbs did not elaborate on the legal basis for such a move but said
that White House lawyers have been researching the matter for days. The
president is seizing the initiative after reports on Friday from London
that BP would voluntarily establish an escrow account — either for
compensating victims or for delaying a planned dividend for BP
shareholders — turned out to be less certain than the White House
initially thought.

The escrow account that the White House envisions would be roughly
modeled after the fund established for victims of the terrorist attacks
on Sept. 11, 2001, and it would be administered by a third party to
provide greater independence and transparency and to guard against the
company too narrowly defining who is entitled to payments and how much.

“We want to make sure that money is escrowed for the legitimate claims
that are going to be, and are being made, by businesses down in the Gulf
— people who’ve been damaged by this,” said David Axelrod, Mr. Obama’s
senior White House strategist, on NBC’s “Meet the Press” television news
program on Sunday. “And we want to make sure that that money is
independently administered so that [they] won’t be slow-walked on these
claims.”

The plans for a prime-time speech and Mr. Obama’s ultimatum on an escrow
account escalate Mr. Obama’s personal engagement in the eight-week-old
environmental and economic crisis. And they set the tone for a week of
events that will have the oil giant publicly on the defensive more than
at any time in the nearly two months since the explosion aboard the
Deepwater Horizon drilling rig a mile below the Gulf’s surface.

The BP board is to hold an emergency meeting on Monday at which it is
expected to discuss both the escrow issue and other issues company
officials will address in a meeting at the White House on Wednesday that
Mr. Obama has summoned them to.

Mr. Obama on Monday and Tuesday will make his fourth trip to the Gulf
coast since the disaster struck on April 20. It will be his first
overnight visit and, after three trips to Louisiana, his first to the
states to its east — Mississippi, Alabama and Florida — which are in the
direction of the spewing oil’s drift.

The president will return to Washington in time to report to the nation
on Tuesday night, and on Wednesday will meet with the chairman of BP’s
board, Carl-Henric Svanberg, accompanied by the company’s chief
executive, Tony Hayward, who has been criticized for statements that
many people considered insensitive and self-serving. And Mr. Hayward
will be in the hot seat on Thursday, testifying before one of several
Congressional committees investigating the calamity.

Administration officials say that Mr. Obama, in his speech from the
White House on Tuesday, will not only discuss the issue of claims
against BP but also update the nation on efforts to capture and contain
the oil, and on his proposals to reorganize the federal system for
regulating offshore oil drilling.

Amid some grumbling from Britain that the Obama administration and the
country are unfairly bashing BP, the president on Saturday discussed the
oil spill and the London-based company in a phone call with the new
British prime minister, David Cameron. A White House statement afterward
described a wide-ranging conversation that covered the countries’
alliance in Afghanistan, sanctions against Iran, the global economy and
the upcoming G of 20 summit meeting of developed nations, and the day’s
World Cup soccer game between England and the United States, which later
ended in a tie.

But the statement also noted, “The President and the Prime Minister
discussed the impact of the tragic oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico,
reiterating that BP must do all it can to respond effectively to the
situation.”

Coast Guard Admiral Thad W. Allen, who is heading the federal response
to the disaster, said on CBS’s “Face the Nation” that he expected an
answer later on Sunday to his request to BP late last week asking its
officials for “a faster plan” to siphon off and collect the gushing oil,
one with “greater redundancy and reliability.”

He also acknowledged the recent determination from government scientists
that the volume of spewing oil could be higher than estimated — up to
40,000 barrels a day. But Adm. Allen tempered his estimate by saying
that the “mid-30,000 range is what we’re looking at.”

Meanwhile, the governors of three of the affected Gulf Coast states
continued to complain that the news media were harmfully exaggerating
the impact of the oil on their beaches and coastal waters, with
Mississippi’s Haley Barbour calling the coverage “very sensational.” Mr.
Barbour said that so far his state has had a “a couple of incursions” of
oil on its barrier islands, but as a result of the coverage on cable
television and other news outlets, “we’ve lost the first third of our
tourist season.”

“They have been clobbered because of the misperception that our whole
coast is knee-deep in oil,” he said of his state’s tourist businesses.

Gov. Bob Riley of Alabama and Gov. Charlie Crist of Florida echoed his
criticism, with Mr. Crist calling his beaches “clean and pristine” and
Mr. Riley urging Americans to “come down and rent a condo, stay in a
hotel, play golf.”

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