Gulf Of Mexico, Bp Oil Spill | featured news

BP will pay approximately $4.5 billion and plead guilty to criminal charges as part of a settlement with the U.S. government over the deadly Deepwater Horizon rig explosion and massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, the London-based oil giant announced Thursday.

The Gulf Coast is a hot destination again two years after the massive BP Plc oil spill made the region a tourist dead zone, with the petroleum giant pumping more than $150 million into promotions to help the region recover.

BP and a committee representing plaintiffs suing over the 2010 Gulf oil spill have reached an estimated $7.8 billion agreement to settle the lawsuit, company officials said late Friday.

A partial settlement of claims made against BP for the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico is very close, sources tell the BBC.

BP Plc has delayed by one week the start of a massive trial to decide who should pay for the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill, to allow more time to cut a deal with tens of thousands of businesses and individuals affected by the disaster.

On the cusp of trial over the catastrophic 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, phalanxes of lawyers, executives and public officials have spent the waning days in settlement talks. Holed up in small groups inside law offices, war rooms and hotel suites in New Orleans and Washington, they are trying to put a number on what BP and its partners in the doomed Macondo well project should pay to make up for the worst offshore spill in U.S. history.

A new oil sheen was spotted in the Gulf of Mexico, although energy company BP said Thursday the discovery had nothing to do with its operations and was far from the site of its disaster-hit Macondo well.

A year after the worst U.S. offshore oil spill swamped the Gulf coast with petroleum and misery, officials on Wednesday declared the hard-hit region reborn.

In the year since the Gulf oil spill, officials along the coast have gone on a spending spree with BP money, dropping tens of millions of dollars on gadgets, vehicles and gear - much of which had little to do with the cleanup, an Associated Press investigation shows....

Several "preventable human and engineering failures were the immediate causes" of the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster last year, a presidentially appointed commission said in its much-awaited report Tuesday.