David Rainey News

A former BP Plc engineer deserves a new trial on an obstruction of justice charge related to the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill, a federal appeals court ruled on Tuesday. The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans agreed with a lower court judge's decision last June to throw out the defendant Kurt Mix's December 2013 conviction. U.S. District Judge Stanwood Duval acted after learning that the jury forewoman admitted to having heard in a courthouse elevator that other BP employees were being prosecuted over the spill…

A U.S. federal jury has begun its deliberations on whether a former BP Plc  executive lied about how much oil spilled into the Gulf of Mexico following the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon rig in April 2010. Prosecutors and a lawyer for defendant David Rainey made their closing arguments to the jury on Friday morning in a case brought by the government over statements Rainey made to agents from the FBI and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) nearly a year after the spill. Rainey, BP's former vice president of exploration in the Gulf, faces a maximum sentence of five years in prison if found guilty of willfully making a fraudulent statement to federal law enforcement agents. The April 20, 2010, explosion of the Deepwater Horizon rig led to 11 deaths and the largest U.S.

A U.S. federal judge on Wednesday denied BP Plc's request to halt payments from the $2.3 billion fund it created to compensate commercial fishermen for financial losses after the British company's 2010 offshore oil spill, according to court records. BP had sought to block the payments after alleging that some individuals supposedly injured by the spill, clients of attorney Mikal Watts, did not exist. The company said it has already paid out more than $1 billion from the so-called Seafood Compensation Fund. U.S. District Judge Carl Barbier in New Orleans, who is overseeing litigation stemming from the spill, denied the motion on Wednesday, according to an entry on the court docket.