British energy giant BP has agreed to pay $20.5 million to settle claims that it cheated the US government and Native Americans out of natural gas royalties, US officials said Friday. Six US subsidiaries of BP - including Amoco, which merged with the British oil major in 1998 - were parties to the settlement, the US Department of Justice (DoJ) said in a statement.
The settlement resolves a long-running lawsuit which alleged that the BP subsidiaries underpaid for natural gas that they extracted on land owned by the US government and Indian reservations. "Natural gas royalties provide an important source of income for the United States, Native Americans, and various states," Assistant Attorney General Tony West said in the statement.
"Through cases like this, we are keeping our commitment to protect public lands and to ensure that companies who take non-renewable resources from those lands pay their fair share of royalties." The US government has collected about $270 million in settlements in similar cases in which various energy companies were accused of short-changing the government and Indian tribes out of natural gas royalties. Chevron, ExxonMobil and Royal Dutch Shell have all paid settlements to resolve such lawsuits. The DoJ said that Friday's settlement explicitly excluded claims against BP arising from last year's devastating oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.