The U.S. Treasury Department has set out 97 pages of rules for investing and allocating money that BP PLC and other defendants will pay in Clean Water Act fines for the Gulf of Mexico oil spill of 2010.
The rules released yesterday formally set up a trust fund for money that state and local governments will get under the RESTORE Act and procedures for getting that money.
The total is expected to be billions of dollars, but nobody knows what it will be.
U.S. District Judge Carl Barbier has scheduled the third of three trials on the question in January.
The trust fund will get 80 percent of the Clean Water Act penalties. The rest go to a trust fund to cover the cost of future oil spills.