A little transparency, please. Yahoo! News:
Well, here’s yet more material for the growing chorus of critics who maintain that the Ken Feinberg-run Gulf Coast Claims Facility isn’t the impartial entity it’s purported to be: According to an AP report, the oil spill relief fund has paid out only one final settlement in a sum higher than its thousands of controversial one-time “quick payment” settlement checks. Those payouts are $5,000 for individuals and $25,000 for businesses, with recipients required to waive all rights to sue BP in the future; in contrast to such stringent provisions, the one outlier payment — totaling a cool $10 million — seems a bit, well, shady.
For starters, the terms of the settlement are shrouded in secrecy, with Feinberg — who’s repeatedly insisted that he operates independently from BP even as the oil giant finances the $20 billion fund — cutting a $10 million check to an unnamed “BP business partner.” That payment came at the behest of the oil giant, something that a BP spokeswoman Hejdi Feick termed “a unique situation.”
“We never reviewed the claim. We honored the request of the parties to fund the claim,” Feinberg told the AP’s Brian Skoloff. “It was a private settlement, and we paid it, but we were not privy to the settlement negotiations between BP and that party.”
The rest here.
If the above is true about no payments other than the biggie to the BP “partner,” that would seem to call into question the honesty of ads like this one where a Destin, Fla. business owner says BP made him whole on dollars he lost due to the spill.