BP Plc prepared on Saturday to move ships and workers back to the Gulf of Mexico oil spill site as a storm that forced a temporary halt to operations began to lose its punch. Meanwhile, Kenneth Feinberg, the independent administrator running a $20 billion fund set up by BP to compensate people for financial losses due to the oil spill, said the British energy giant is holding up payments to economic victims.
BP stalling payments to oil spill victims: Feinberg "I have a concern that BP is stalling claims. Yes, BP is stalling. I doubt they are stalling for money. It's not that. I just don't think they know the answers to the questions (by claimants)," Feinberg told reporters in Alabama.
A rig drilling a relief well intended to halt the leak for good and other ships were being readied for a return to the site, a BP spokeswoman said. The rig stopped operations on Friday in advance of the storm. "The rig is preparing to return to the spill site as quickly as it can," said Jessie Baker, a spokeswoman for BP. She could not say when the rig would resume work.
The US National Hurricane Centre said Tropical Depression Bonnie was less likely to redevelop into a tropical storm and could degenerate into an area of low pressure later on Saturday. The approach of the storm had forced many workers and ships at the spill site to evacuate. "We think that the system no longer has a threat of becoming a tropical storm again," said Lixion Avila, a senior forecaster at the Miami-based hurricane centre.
Bonnie was downgraded from a tropical storm to a depression as it weakened on its trek across Florida into the Gulf on Friday. Avila said Bonnie could dissipate into a broad area of low pressure if its sustained winds fall another 5 miles (8 km) per hour.

The storm was on course to make landfall between the Louisiana coast and Florida's north-west Panhandle late on Saturday. The ruptured deep-sea well - a mile (1.6 km) under the ocean surface - is located off the coast of Louisiana. BP sealed the leak last week with a tight-fitting containment cap, choking off the flow of oil for the first time since an April 20 rig explosion killed 11 workers and sent crude spewing into the Gulf, soiling coastlines in five US states and devastating tourism and fishery industries.
It was unclear how long the interruption would push back BP's mid-August target date for completing a relief well that would permanently plug the ruptured well. But the well will remain capped, easing fears the flow would resume.
The storm preparations also delayed another potential solution, the launch of a "static kill" operation to pump heavy drilling mud and possibly cement into the well. BP agreed to set up the $20 billion fund under pressure from US President Barack Obama.
Feinberg made his comments on the sidelines of a town hall meeting in southern Alabama at which fishermen and other business owners expressed frustration and anger at what they say is a slow and complex claims process that lacks transparency. Thousands of businesses in Gulf coast states have been crippled by the oil spill.
"After today there will be no more business as usual. I learned today the depth of frustration in people here on the coast," Feinberg told the meeting. BP's spill, the worst in US history, is believed to have spewed more than five million barrels of oil into the Gulf and has complicated relations between close allies the United States and Britain.
In another development involving BP, British Foreign Secretary William Hague said in a letter to a US lawmaker that the British energy company behaved in a "perfectly normal and legitimate" way in lobbying the British government in 2007 for a prisoner transfer agreement with Libya.
In the letter to US Senator John Kerry, Hague reiterated the British government's position that there is no evidence BP had any connection to Scottish authorities' release last year of the man convicted of the 1988 bombing of a US airliner over Lockerbie, Scotland.
British documents show several discussions between BP and the British government in 2007, Hague said, when a prisoner transfer deal with Libya was being negotiated at the same time BP was pursuing an oil exploration deal with Libya.
The US Senate Foreign Relations Committee, chaired by Kerry, has scheduled a July 29 hearing to examine whether BP's oil interests influenced the 2009 release of the only person convicted in the bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. The bombing killed 270 people, most of them Americans.