Yesterday, Texas trial attorney Brent Coon purchased and mailed each of the individuals of the British Petroleum (BP) senior management team a U.S. lottery ticket for the upcoming drawing hoping to win a record jackpot prize of nearly $1.4 Billion dollars.
Coon bought the tickets for BP under the condition that “any winning ticket will be donated by my firm in your name to my clients in dire straits.” According to recent reports the approximate “lump sum payout” for the Powerball Jackpot would be over $800 Million dollars.
Mr. Coon’s letter to BP is below.
Dear BP Executives,
I represent several thousand clients in unresolved claims filed against BP as a result of the oil spill. These clients range from business owners in the seafood industries, tourism industries, gaming industries to a host of others from Florida to Texas.
More than five years into this spill, most have not been offered A DIME in compensation from BP, much less any settlement offer, in spite of our submissions to the initial OPA program at BP, extensive documentation of many of the claims when remitted to your Gulf Coast Claims Facility before it was shut down, and final demands to BP through the last OPA program set up and also shut down by BP. In addition, we have made numerous requests to BP counsel to sit down and discuss resolution. Those requests have NEVER even been responded to. Almost all of the clients handled by my firm suffered significant financial hardship as a result of this spill, and some of these hard working business owners did not have enough sustaining capital afterwards and closed their doors forever.
BP says publicly that it wants to settle all claims, but the reality is that BP has NO DESIRE to settle anything unless it is exposed to trial.
Accordingly, we are taking the initiative today to buy POWERBALL tickets for each of you in senior management positions at BP, and since none of you need the money due to the very generous salaries and bonuses each of you continue to draw while my clients are starved out, any winning ticket will be donated by my firm in your name to my clients in dire straits. I hope that one of you wins, as it is likely that is the only way any of these poor folks are going to get anything but lip service from BP until I can get these cases out of the MDL and set for trial, and we will get them out sooner or later.
We would like to say thanks in advance in a parting salutation, but we don’t have anything to say thanks for, so we will just say “GOOD LUCKâ€. Oh yeah, and see you at the courthouse.
Brent W. Coon
Founder-Brent Coon & Associates