BP CEO Bernard Looney
(Picture: AFP via Getty Images)BP boss Bernard Looney has been awarded a £4.5 million payday just as UK households face a big rise in household energy bills due to soaring oil and gas prices.
The leap in Looney’s renumeration includes bonuses of £2.4 million as a result of the company’s performance last year, in addition to his £1.3 million salary.
The FTSE 100 oil and energy company reported its biggest profit in eight years, with earnings of $12.8 billion (£9.45 billion) for 2021 compared with a loss of $5.7 billion (£4.34 billion) the year before.
BP has promised to increase its dividend to shareholders by 4% in the second quarter of 2022 and is carrying out a more than $4 billion ($3 billion) in share buybacks from 2021’s surplus cash flow.
News of Looney’s pay comes at a time when MPs and the public alike have called for a “windfall” tax on the profits of North Sea oil companies, including BP and rival Shell. Revenues of these oil majors have surged thanks to higher oil and gas prices, partly fuelled by sanctions on Russian supplies due to its invasion of Ukraine.
At the same time, soaring gas prices mean households now face heating bills of up to £3,000 a year and petrol is predicted to rise to as much as £2.40 a litre.
BP stressed that the chief executive’s pay package had been adjusted to ensure that he was not just benefiting from rising oil prices, which he previously said turned the company into a “cash machine”.
Rival Shell revealed last week that it had awarded a 26% pay rise to its boss Ben van Beurden whose annual pay increased to €7.4 million (£6.2 million).
At the end of last month BP exited its 19.75% shareholding in Russian oil giant Rosneft following pressure from the UK government over the conflict in Ukraine. At the time, Looney also said he would resign from the Rosneft board with “immediate effect”.
Looney was one of two BP representatives on the Rosneft board as a result of 2013 deal between predecessor Bob Dudley and Igor Sechin, the Rosneft chief with strong links to President Vladimir Putin.
