A federal appeals court this month agreed with BP PLC that there were serious problems with the processing of claims on its $9.6 billion Deepwater Horizon settlement, especially because some Gulf Coast businesses apparently were being compensated for economic losses from the oil spill that they never actually suffered.

In coming to that conclusion, a split panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ran into a separate problem: If they weren’t truly victims, why were these claimants included in a class settlement premised on compensating victims of the spill? Wouldn’t that undermine the settlement entirely?

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