BP does not want to pay the full price for oil spill damages by Bryan Walsh | @bryanrwalsh | February 17, 2011 | + Tweet. You might remember back when the oil was still gushing into the Gulf of Mexico in June, and then BP-CEO Tony "make this right" Hayward apologized for the oil disaster and promised that the company would, you know, actually make it right. They even made a TV spot about it—wait, sorry, wrong disaster. Try this one instead: But as it turns out, when BP said they would "make this right," apparently they actually meant they'd make it right—as long as it didn't cost them too much. The New York Times reports that BP is arguing that the settlement terms negotiated by Kenneth Feinberg from the $20 billion compensation fund for oil spill victims are too generous, given the actual damage done by the catastrophe. Feinberg based his compensation claims on the assumption that the recovery from the spill will be relatively quick, so that most claimants would get double their 2010 losses. He has been strongly criticized by many Gulf residents and politicians for underestimating the possible extent of the oil spill damages, but BP thinks he's being too generous. In an extensive filing with the Gulf Coast Claims Facility, BP argues that the planned payments exceed the likely future damages because they overestimate the potential for future losses: There is thus no credible support for the assumption of an artificially high future loss factor purely on the basis of the inherent uncertainties in predicting the future and the mere possibility that future damages could occur. This is especially true where, as here, the proposed methodology gives GCCF claimants the option to protect themselves against such a risk. Each claimant has a unilateral option to choose between a final offer and an interim offer. Accordingly, all claimants who believe their future losses are likely to be greater than the GCCF predicted future loss factor can choose to reject a final payment offer at this time and instead opt for interim payments as provided through OPA. Moreover, the proposed future loss factor is subject to revision if warranted by new data. The GCCF plans to review the future loss factor every four months in light of new data and revise if necessary. BP instead suggests that damages should be closer to 25 to 50% of claimants' 2010 losses—clearly smaller than Feinberg's terms. Ultimately, as the administrator of the independent fund, Feinberg has control over the claims—and I doubt the man, who I believe was never meant to publicly work for BP, will take kindly to being rebuffed. (We can put to rest those rumors that Feinberg is secretly working for the oil company.) But that's not all. In a wonderful little bit of timing, BP's comments came to light on the same day that the Oil Spill Commission released its final evaluation report—the news contained within revealed that BP had known a year before the accident that there were problems with Halliburton, the company that conducted the faulty cementing job on the Deepwater Horizon. "The sad fact is that this was a completely preventable catastrophe," commission chief counsel Fred Bartlit said in a statement. "Bad management decisions were the real cause." At the same time, BP is trying to wriggle out of paying damages from this very spill. It's certainly a different tune than BP was singing back in June, when the company agreed to the $20 billion fund, and BP chairman Carl-Henric Svanberg once said: We care about the little people. I sometimes hear comments about big oil companies or greedy corporations, who have no interest in this, but that is not the case with BP. We care about the little people. There's a legal term in Yiddish for all this: "chutzpah."