BP ERISA Lawsuits Moved to Texas

Houston, TXThe ERISA lawsuits filed by employees against BP that allege the oil company mismanaged their retirement savings plans have been moved to a federal court in Texas.

span itemprop="image" itemscope itemtype="https://schema.org/ImageObject" style="display:block">The employees had hoped that the cases would be combined in Chicago, where the ERISA pension plans are administered, but a federal court decided to move them to Houston, where BP faces a number of investor lawsuits over the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, according to Bloomberg.

In the lawsuits, employees allege that their retirement savings plans lost $1 billion following the April 20th oil spill.

The court ruled that it made sense to move the cases to Houston, where BP is facing other oil spill litigation.

"Certainly, there are differences between the securities actions and the ERISA actions," the Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation said. "Notwithstanding those differences, there is significant overlap between the ERISA and securities actions, warranting their concentration in a single docket."

According to the news source, the oil giant is facing more than 400 lawsuits stemming from the April explosion of the Deepwater Horizon rig in the Gulf of Mexico, which caused the largest offshore oil spill in US history.