(At the BP claims center in Gretna, Louisiana, July 17. Photo: BP)
The first report came in today from Pro Publica's investigation into the way BP is paying (and not paying) damage claims from the Deepwater Horizon disaster. BP set $20 billion aside for people whose livelihoods have disappeared as a result of its nightmare well.
Unless your livelihood depended on commission. Duane Sandy sells storage units in Fort Walton Beach. Since the Deepwater Horizon began leaking, Sandy says he hasn't closed the deal on a single one. First BP told him he hadn't documented the claim well enough. And then?
Sandy said that when he called BP's adjuster, he heard a different story -- that BP would not pay his claim because it was not approving payments for income loss based on commissions. "Once they heard I got paid by commission, they didn't care what I did," Sandy said.
Hours after Pro Publica posted the story, BP put out a press release acknowledging that it's not paying certain claims. In classic BP-ese, the press release is titled "BP Takes Action to Fast-Track Claims for Gulf Coast Businesses." Apparently they're waiting for claims czar Ken Feinberg to sort out the ones BP doesn't understand.
Leave a Comment:
Has Last Years Income Tax Returns, and What the Claimant's Filed (Last Year), Being Taken into Consideration?
I would Think that is Better then Nothing, and Would Think This Would be a Fair Way of Reinbursing Victims that are Filing Any Claims?
Of Course, I Think BP Will Do Anything to Avoid Having to Pay, or Pay as LIttle as Possible.= Quite Obvious Here as Stated Above!
I Think we Will be Seeing Many Different Problems/ Aspects of the Deep Water Horizen Disaster to Come?
Diana B
CRIMINAL!!!
Does this really surprise anyone?
We knew they were lying when they said they would make things RIGHT.
They have lied about everything else from the beginning.
All they have to do is STALL, like EXXON, and they will end up paying very little (if anything) to the folks "on the ground".
When it comes to actual payments I suspect that BP will be slow to 'understand' American law with relevance to claim disputes.
Have they even gotten the money into escrow yet? Aren't they trying to get out of that too? It's criminal and I hope there are criminal charges coming from this disaster.
Corporations are driven by the bottom line. I remember when Rikki Ott came to my college and spoke of Exxon's inadequacies regarding how they viewed the oil spill in Alaska. They viewed the spill as a PR disaster, not an environmental disaster. BP's actions show definitively what they leaned from that disaster; not how to clean up oil spill's, they learned how to mitigate PR disaster's. In that vein, of course they are not going to pat on claims. They are going to say they are, but then not do it.
From BP's track record, would we expect anything different?