"BP suffers investor rebellion at first AGM since climate strategy U-turn", 17 April 2025

"BP suffered an investor rebellion on Thursday after facing shareholders for the first time since abandoning its climate strategy at a meeting marred by protest.

About a quarter of shareholders voted against the chair, Helge Lund, at the company’s annual meeting in Sunbury-on-Thames, on the edges of London, which attracted protest from several green campaign groups.

The Guardian understands that five protesters were forcibly blocked from entering the meeting before the vote, which marked the first time in at least a decade that more than 10% of BP’s shareholders voted against the re-election of the chair...

The shareholder meeting was held weeks after Lund, who presided over BP’s failed green agenda, promised to step down from the company by next year.

Despite his resignation, the chair was forced to face a shareholder vote to re-elect him to the post until his departure, creating a lightning rod for disgruntled investors. The resolution received a provisional 24.3% of opposed votes...

The outgoing chair told shareholders that the company had “pursued too much while looking to build new low-carbon businesses” but that “lessons have been learned”.

BP’s chief executive, Murray Auchincloss, repeated his previous claim that BP’s optimism in the global green energy transition was “misplaced”, and that the board’s “one simple goal” was to “grow the long-term value of your investment”...

Agathe Masson, a campaigner at Reclaim Finance, said the historic vote “sends a clear message to the BP board that their green U-turn was a backwards step and that some shareholders clearly want to invest in a green transition”.

The rebellion included the UK asset manager Legal & General, a leading shareholder in BP, which voiced plans to vote against Lund’s re-election ahead of the vote, citing the company’s recent green U-turn and its decision not to allow its shareholders to vote on the new direction.

Under Auchincloss, BP has scrapped plans to restrict its fossil fuel production in favour of green investments. Instead, the company will be “very selective” about investing in low-carbon options while growing its planned fossil fuel production to 2.4m barrels of oil and gas a day by 2030 – about 60% higher than the figure in its net zero plan set out five years ago.

The vote marks the biggest rebellion against the board since 2016, when almost 60% of shareholders voted against BP’s decision to hand the then CEO, Bob Dudley, a $20m (£15.1m) pay packet in the same year that a global oil market rout pushed the company to record losses..."