Final Exxon Valdez bill looks set at US$1bn

Oil giant Exxon has been ordered by a US appeals court to pay US$507.5m in damages and around a further US$480m in interest over the Exxon Valdez oil spill in 1989. The ruling reaffirmed the figure set last year by the US Supreme Court and, importantly, decided that interest payments should run from the time of the original judgement in 1996, when an Alaskan court ordered the company to pay a record US$5bn in punitive damages, and not the Supreme Court ruling of last year. Exxon has been appealing the original damages award for the past 13 years and has been ordered to cover its own US$70m legal costs. It is thought that around a fifth of the original 33,000 plaintiffs have died since the appeals process began. Unless the company appeals again to the Supreme Court, the current ruling marks the end of the case.

 

In a related case, the US Supreme Court has struck down a tax on tankers calling at the Alaskan port of Valdez as unconstitutional. Oil firm ConocoPhilips had contested the tax, but an earlier Alaskan court ruling declared it to be a property tax and not a tonnage tax, which is forbidden under a constitutional rule to promote free trade. The Supreme Court has now ruled in a majority decision that the tax is in effect an indirect tonnage tax and as such is unconstitutional.

 

 

(Source: Maritime Global Net)