BP has clawed back £1.8m from sacked former chief executive Bernard Looney, but the oil company has awarded his successor an £8m pay packet that has been described by campaigners as “sickening”.
Looney left in September after failing to disclose personal relationships with colleagues to the board after a tip-off from a whistleblower. The board later formally dismissed him and said it had found his actions amounted to “serious misconduct”.
The departure, less than four years into his tenure as boss, shocked shareholders and forced the FTSE 100 company into an emergency search for a successor, even as it made billions of pounds in profits. Oil and gas companies have benefited enormously from the global energy crisis caused by Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in early 2022.
Looney would have been due a salary of £1.2m for 2023. However, BP applied provisions in his contract allowing the company to claw back £3m, meaning his salary for 2023 was technically -£1.8m, according to the company’s annual report, published on Friday.
Looney will not have to actually pay BP that full amount, as most of the clawback provisions related to payments that had not yet been delivered. However, he will have to pay back bonus payments worth about £420,000.
BP on Friday said Looney had lost out on total share awards and other pay worth about £29m, less than the £32m initially estimated.
Murray Auchincloss stepped in as BP’s temporary chief executive after Looney’s departure, before being made permanent in January. The promotion has proven lucrative for Auchincloss, who previously served as chief financial officer. His total pay rose from £5.4m in 2022 to £8m in 2023, according to the annual report.
Auchincloss’s pay package includes a £1m salary, £338,000 in benefits, and shares and cash bonuses worth £6.5m. He received car-related benefits, help with preparing his tax return, security assistance, health and life insurance and medical benefits, the annual report said.
Auchincloss’s salary puts him among the top-earning FTSE 100 chief executives. BP reported profits $14bn for 2023, down from $28bn the year before at the height of the global crisis.
Alice Harrison, the fossil fuels campaign leader at Global Witness, a campaign group on natural resources issues, said: “People everywhere, struggling to feed their families or heat their homes, have every right to be angry at BP’s huge profits and payouts.
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“BP and its CEO count among the biggest winners of Russia’s war in Ukraine.”
She said BP had “profiteered massively from the resulting turbulence in energy markets, and now the firm has decided to give its CEO a multimillion, fat cat pat on the back whilst most people are living paycheque to paycheque”.
BP’s executive bonuses for 2023 were cut by 2.5% to take into account the death of a contractor working for BP. In two further incidents, two employees working for a subsidiary of TravelCenters of America died. BP’s remuneration committee decided not to cut bonuses further because those deaths happened shortly after BP bought the company.
BP did not comment on Global Witness’s criticisms.
