BP on Tuesday accused a Texas lawyer of fraudulently driving up its settlement costs in the 2010 Gulf Coast oil spill by claiming to represent tens of thousands of clients who turned out to be “phantoms.” 
 
 In a lawsuit filed in Federal District Court in New Orleans, the oil giant, which has been fighting the administration of a settlement with plaintiffs in the courtroom and in the news media, claimed that it relied on the client count supplied by the lawyer, Mikal C. Watts, in 2010 when it put $2.3 billion into a special compensation program for the seafood industry. Watts had claimed to represent more than 40,000 deckhands who suffered economic injuries from the 2010 spill—more than 76 percent of the individual crew members projected to be potential claimants, BP said. Under these circumstances, BP is not going to stand idly by and allow payments to proceed without first addressing the fraudulent conduct.” 
 
 Robert McDuff, an attorney representing Watts, described his client in a statement as “an innocent man” and said he “never committed identity theft and did not defraud BP or anyone else.” The statement added: “All actions taken were in good faith that legitimate claims were being filed for real people who had been hurt by PB’s gross negligence. Mr. McDuff stated that Mr. Watts filed claims “in good faith that legitimate claims were being filed for real people.” 
 
 BP, which has paid nearly $13 billion in claims to businesses, individuals and the government so far, has paid out $1 billion from the seafood fund so far. Mr. Watts ultimately filed just 648 individual crew claims through the seafood fund, BP said, and just eight have been found eligible for payment. In examining those claims, the company said it found that 40 percent of the claims used Social Security numbers that belonged to someone other than the person supposedly making the claim; 13 percent gave incomplete numbers or obvious fakes such as 000-00-0001. “For 5 percent, the Social Security number belonged to a dead person other than the named claimant.” 
 
 Watts ultimately filed only 648 individual claims under the seafood-industry program, fewer than 2 percent of the more than 40,000 he originally purported to represent, BP said. Judge Barbier named him to the committee of plaintiffs’ lawyers that helps run the litigation; he resigned from the Plaintiffs’ Steering Committee on March 13 this year, however, not long after Secret Service Agents executed search warrants at his San Antonio law office, a move that the Department of Justice officials suggested was related to the questions about his clients in the BP case.
– Three years after the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, BP has launched a suit of its own—against a plaintiffs' lawyer who, the company says, has represented tens of thousands of "phantom" clients in the case. BP says part of its settlement over the spill, worth $2.3 billion, was calculated using figures from lawyer Mikal Watts. "The facts of this case shout fraud," says a BP rep. "Tens of thousands of Mikal Watts’ clients have proved to be phantoms," and the "false representations improperly inflated the value of potential claims" in the seafood industry, Businessweek reports. Watts has said he was fighting for some 40,000 deckhands affected by the disaster, but half of them aren't real, according to BP, which found that 45% of their supposed social security numbers actually belonged to others, living or dead; others had made-up numbers. A lawyer for Watts says he "never committed identity theft and did not defraud BP or anyone else," and claims were reviewed by an independent body. He calls BP's move "another of a series of efforts to walk away from the settlement to which it agreed," the New York Times reports. In other BP news: An exploration well off Brazil turns out not to have commercially-viable amounts of fuel; the company will write off more than $1 billion in related costs, the Wall Street Journal reports. But BP says it has made a major oil discovery in the Gulf of Mexico, adding to a big year for the company's exploration efforts.