Gulf Spill: Transocean Moves to Limit Liability; HAL Upgraded

Shares of Transocean (RIG) are up 27 cents, or 0.4%, at $68.41, following the Wall Street Journal story by Mark Long and Angel Gonzalez that the firm is going on offense in the war of liability for the Gulf of Mexico spill, filing a petition to limit its liability to $27 million.

Transocean’s filing says the spill “were not caused or contributed to, done, occasioned and/or incurred by any fault, negligance, unseaworthiness, or lack of due care on the part of the petitioners, or anyone for whom petitioners are or at any material time were responsible,” write Long and Gonzalez, citing anonymous sources.

The filing comes a day after further grueling testimony by Transocean’s CEO in Congress, along with executives from BP (BP), which holds most of the bag for the disaster, Halliburton (HAL), and Cameron International (CAM), the latter two of which provided services and parts for the Transocean drilling rig.

FBR Capital analyst Robert MacKenzie, reviewing the two days of testimoney, upgraded shares of Haliburton to “Outperform” from “Market Perform” after having downgraded the shares on April 30. MacKenzie says some reasons for the disaster are becoming clearer, and he now thinks that “absent a court finding [the services providers] to have been grossly negligent, an exceedingly difficult standard to prove, that the well owner undoubtedly end up footing the bill for remediation, clean up, and associated damages.”