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Politics : American Presidential Politics and foreign affairs -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: DuckTapeSunroof who wrote (43992)	7/2/2010 8:46:01 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 71588

They voluntarily agreed* to pay more. Big difference!* Not a big difference since they will be paying it, and since it wasn't entirely vouluntary anyway. The $75 million liability cap still exists in US law Sure but as I pointed out its not much of a cap, and BP's liability, even their expectations of possible liability before any disaster, would not be limited to $75mil. They would know for example that the cleanup costs would not be covered and that they would be well over $75mil on any spill big enough to make news. Also they would know that fines and penalties exist that are not in any way effected by the liability cap, and that if they violated regs in any way that reasonably contributed to the spill that the cap would not be imposed. Its not "a $75mil cap" full stop, its "a $75 mil cap, on a subset of costs, that doesn't apply even to that subset under many circumstances". Reasonably for any blowout BP would have expected liability and fines to cost them billions of dollars (although probably not the tens of billions this looks like its going to cost them).