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Under US law, BP will be fined for the spill according to the size at the rate of $US1100-$US4300 a barrel.
The formula suggests that BP’s civil fines have been increasing at the rate of up to $US258 million a day for the past 59 days – and are likely to continue until a relief well can be drilled in August.
Further billion-dollar penalties will also be incurred for violations of the Clean Water Act and other legislation.
The figures exclude a $US20bn compensation fund agreed with President Obama for victims of the spill.
BP had profits of $US17bn last year and sales of $US239bn.
The company has denied talk of bankruptcy, but yesterday its chief financial officer Byron Grote tried to reassure investors.
US shareholders have been selling shares in the company, once Britain’s largest, while it was reported that Bank of America Merrill Lynch had ordered its traders not to enter into oil deals with BP extending beyond June 2011.
On Monday, Fitch, the international ratings agency, downgraded the company’s credit rating by six notches to BB, just two notches shy of junk status.
BP has also retained Goldman Sachs, Credit Suisse and Blackstone, a restructuring specialist, to help it deal with increasing liabilities.
Experts said that BP’s chances of surviving – without being forced to sell off assets, limit its liabilities through a partial bankruptcy filing or by accepting a takeover bid – depended on how quickly the chief executive Tony Hayward and the chairman Carl-Henric Svanberg could resolve the crisis.
BP has promised that a relief well can be drilled by August, allowing for the injection of a cement plug that would stop the leak.
But some have suggested that this could be optimistic.
Dan Pickering, the head of research at the energy investor Tudor Pickering Holt in Houston, said that the worst-case scenario would be that the leak continued until Christmas.
“This process is teaching us to be sceptical of deadlines,” he said.
One senior lawyer familiar with the company, which celebrated its 100th birthday in 2008, said: “The speed with which this has happened is just extraordinary.”
He suggested that placing part of the business, BP America Production – the unit responsible for the spill – into bankruptcy would protect the rest of the company, although still carried risks.
A demerger of its US business to free the rest of the company is another possibility.
Professor Freeman said that a better option would be to make a deal with Congress that would create legislation to protect it from liabilities.
However, this would be possible only if BP could stop the leak and the political atmosphere cooled sufficiently to allow it.
Whatever happens, she added that BP would probably drag out proceedings for as long as possible to spread the impact on the company’s finances.
“It took 20 years to settle after the Exxon Valdez spill. There could eventually be some large settlement that resolves claims once and for all.”
But the outlook for BP’s top executives remains difficult.
One senior source in the oil industry said: “Hayward will have to go and the chairman (Mr Svanberg) will probably have to go too. He was a bad choice because they needed someone with more of an American profile and experience.”
He said that they were unlikely to resign until the well had been capped.
Pierre Terzian, director of Petrostrategies based in Paris, said that BP, which was built on a lucrative concession to produce oil in Persia with the backing of Winston Churchill, likened the company’s actions to its colonial past.
“This was 19th-century behaviour – where the safety of people and the environment were neglected and put ahead of higher profits and production,” he said.