Jeremy Warner, assistant editor of The Daily Telegraph, wasn't too impressed with last week's $18.7 billion settlement reached by U.S. federal, state and local governments with oil titan BP over its 2010 oil spill.
"From the moment the Deepwater Horizon oil rig suffered a blowout, spilling millions of barrels of the black stuff into the Gulf of Mexico, America’s treatment of BP, driven by a vindictive and essentially anti-British Obama administration, has been a total disgrace,"
he writes.
"I say this not because BP doesn’t deserve harsh treatment — it most certainly does — but because the punishment meted out is both grossly disproportionate and quite out of keeping with anything the U.S. authorities would have imposed on any American corporation."
Obama's handling of the BP spill has a strong element of politics in it, Warner says. "An electorally desperate Obama deliberately went for BP, playing populist, anti-British sentiment for all it was worth."
To be sure, BP itself is apparently happy to have closure on the issue. "It makes me feel like the company can now plan its future," BP CEO, Robert Dudley,
told The New York Times. "It allows us to have this manageable cash flow, including increasing a commitment to investment in the U.S., which was increasingly uncertain for us."
Stock analysts too say a burden has been lifted from BP. Fadel Gheit of Oppenheimer & Co. compared the settlement to a 30-year mortgage and told The Times it could have been twice as high.
"BP is now in the best shape since Macondo [the oil spill] in terms of looking into the future," he said. “The only risk going forward for BP is oil prices, and that is the same for Exxon Mobil or Chevron or any other company."
BP shares have risen 6 percent so far this year to $40.42, as oil prices have climbed 2.2 percent. The settlement led Morningstar analyst Stephen Simko to increase
his fair value estimate for BP to $47 from $45.
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