Mexico Sues BP Over Gulf Disaster As Oil Giant Faces 2,200 New Lawsuits In Less Than 2 Months.

(telegraph.co.uk) - The explosion on the Deepwater Horizon rig on April 20, 2010, killed 11 men and unleashed the worst offshore oil spill in US history.

In first-quarter results on Tuesday, BP said that since March 6 it had been named as a defendant "in more than 2,200 additional civil lawsuits brought by individuals, corporations and government entities" and warned that "further actions are likely to be brought".

It said the plaintiffs in these cases included "a foreign government", understood to be Mexico, which had threatened to sue BP soon after the 2010 accident.

BP said it believed the onslaught of new lawsuits had been submitted ahead of the third anniversary of the disaster, after which the company could have tried to use a statute of limitations to dismiss their claims.

BP has now made provisions of $42.2bn for the costs of the spill but has warned that this does not include amounts for obligations it cannot reliably measure and the final bill remains subject to "significant uncertainty".

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