A lawyer who worked reviewing damage claims from the massive BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico has been suspended due to allegations that he had been collection portions of settlement payments from a New Orleans law firm, according to the Associated Press.
A report of the allegations has been given to U.S. District Judge Carl Barbier. Barbier held a meeting in his chambers with all of the lawyers who had put together the multibillion-dollar settlement reached between the oil giant and those devastated by the spill.
The accused lawyer, Lionel H. Sutton III, informed the Associated Press by email that he had been suspended "pending an investigation of an anonymous allegation against me."
"I have not been made aware of the substance of the allegation or the status of the investigation," Sutton said. "Once this is resolved, I would be happy to discuss it all with you."
A BP official spoke with the Associated Press on the condition of anonymity and said that claims administrator Patrick Juneau had learned about Sutton after his office received a complaint stating that Sutton had referred claims to a New Orleans law firm and was to receive settlement payments for doing so.
The settlement in question was filed by a single party and the payment was of hundreds of thousands of dollars, the BP official told the Associated Press.
The oil conglomerate has filed suit to block payouts to many businesses from the settlement that total billions of dollars claiming that Juneau has rewritten the deal and is trying to force the company into paying for claims that were not agreed to in the settlement.
The 2010 spill was caused when the oil rig Deepwater Horizon exploded and poured roughly 200 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. It took months for the well to be capped with oil leaking out the entire time, decimating marshes, beaches and fisheries while killing immense swaths of wildlife, according to the Associated Press.
