BP sued in 2,200 new Gulf of Mexico cases in less than two months It said the plaintiffs in these cases included "a foreign government." BP was not immediately able to confirm the identity but it is thought likely to be Mexico, which has previously threatened legal action over the accident. BP said it would try to get the new cases incorporated into the existing trial in New Orleans, which is considering most of the existing civil claims. The first phase of the trial concluded earlier this month. BP said most of the new claims were made under the Oil Pollution Act and it believed that claimants "may have sought to file these lawsuits in advance of the third anniversary of the incident on 20 April 2013, on which date certain OPA 90 claims may have been subject to time bar challenges by BP under OPA 90's three-year statute of limitations." It warned: "The magnitude and timing of all possible obligations in relation to the Gulf of Mexico oil spill continue to be subject to a very high degree of uncertainty. Furthermore, for those items where a provision has been recorded, significant uncertainty also exists in relation to the ultimate exposure and cost to BP. In March 2012 BP reached a settlement with thousands of Gulf coast residents over compensation for economic loss suffered as a result of the disaster. At the time it estimated the cost of the settlement to be $7.8bn, but has repeatedly revised that total. The estimate reached as high as $8.5bn by the end of 2012. However BP alleges that many of the claims are "fictitious" and the compensation awards made by the settlement administrator are unduly high, going against what was originally agreed. It has made several legal challenges attempting to halt payouts, so far unsuccessfully. In March it revised its estimate of the cost back down to $7.7bn to cover only those claims that had been received and processed by the administrator, on the grounds it was not possible to reliably estimate any others. On Tuesday it put the estimate back up to $8.2bn but reiterated warnings that, even if its legal challenges were successful, the total cost would be "significantly higher than the current estimate" because of the claims that had not yet been received or processed, and because average payments per claim were so far are higher than anticipated. If it loses the legal challenges, it will need to make "a further significant increase to the total estimated cost of the PSC settlement."