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 activists from Fossil Free London and Energy Embargo for Palestine protested outside the venue, describing the board as “murderers, looters and genocide enablers”, before major institutional investors voted against the re-election of Lund.
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”.
A strategy overhaul was considered by many industry commentators as BP’s only defence against the advance of an aggressive activist investor fund that could threaten the breakup of the 115-year-old company.
The feared New York fund Elliott Investment Management amassed a stake in the company earlier this year. It typically takes aim at underperforming companies by agitating for changes that could resuscitate their flagging market value.
Elliott is expected to call for sweeping changes to BP, which has lagged behind rivals such as Shell and ExxonMobil that have profited from the global energy market crisis in recent years by increasing their fossil fuel production.
Mark Van Baal, the founder of the green activist investor group Follow This, said shareholders had “made it clear that weakening climate commitments is unacceptable”.
He added: “This historical result serves as a wake-up call to BP’s board and emphasises investor expectation for robust governance mechanisms and genuine leadership on ESG issues.”
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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.
The latest shareholder standoff took place almost 15 years to the day after the deadly Deepwater Horizon disaster led to the largest marine oil spill in US history and plunged the company into a $70bn dollar crisis.
The company announced this week an oil discovery in “the Gulf of America” – using Donald Trump’s newly mandated US name for the Gulf of Mexico – which it said underscored its plan to “step up investment in exploration”.
