Jim Hood filed a court motion on behalf of the state, whose residents suffered heavily when BP's oil well exploded killing 11 men last April. He is urging better supervision of the $20bn (£12bn) fund by Carl Barbier, the judge in charge of overseeing legal action against BP. The attorney general claims that people are signing "seemingly very low settlements" that bar them from later legal action, because emergency relief money has not been paid quickly enough. "This scheme is another device for BP [through the fund] to entice claimants to sign a release and to improperly leverage those releases by intentionally underpaying interim claims," he claimed.