Obama vows to make BP pay

16th Jun 2010 07:37

US president Barack Obama stepped up the pressure on beleaguered oil giant BP last night with a vow to make the company pay for its "recklessness" in the Gulf of Mexico.In a speech to the US nation using the intimate setting of the White House's Oval Office for the first time, Obama said he would tell BP to set up a compensation fund for those affected by the spill.There could be more bad news for BP after the Times said the Brazilian government has asked its oil industry regulator to review the company's $7bn acquisition of Devon Energy announced in March.Officials are flying to Houston next week for talks with BP about the accident, which took place six weeks before the Deepwater Horizon blast that killed 11 people and caused the worst environmental disaster in US history.The speech came as a revised estimate put the amount leaking from the Gulf spillage at 60,000 barrels per day, twelve times greater than BP originally suggested.Obama is meeting with BP's chairman Carl-Henric Svanberg today and will tell him the firm has to set aside "whatever resources are required to compensate the workers and business owners who have been harmed as a result of the company's recklessness". "We will fight this spill with everything we've got for as long it takes," the president added, saying that the Gulf catastrophe should also be used as a catalyst to end the country's dependence on cheap oil."The time to embrace a clean energy future is now," Obama insisted and renewed his call for the US "to embark on a national mission to unleash American innovation and seize control of our own destiny".Obama's handling of the crisis has been heavily criticised in the US and there was scepticism over how he could make BP contribute to an independently controlled fund.In a statement, BP replied that it shared the goal of cleaning up the oil and helping the people affected by the spill. It said it was looking forward to today's meeting "for a constructive discussion about how best to achieve these mutual goals" but did not say it would co-operate with the US president's demands.