BP will next week try to reach a truce in its acrimonious battle with the US administration over its huge oil spill in Gulf of -Mexico, but will reject calls for the company to pay damages to all other companies' oil rig workers laid off because of a drilling ban.

Tony Hayward and Carl-Henric Svanberg, BP's chief executive and chairman, will on Wednesday meet Barack Obama, the US president, for the first time since the Deepwater Horizon rig disaster on April 20. The accident killed 11 oil workers and resulted in tens of thousands of barrels of oil spewing into the Gulf of Mexico.

The BP executives hope to use the meeting in Washington to reassure the administration that the company will do everything possible to stop the leak, clean up the spill and pay compensation for damage caused.