BP PLC (BP.)

BP PLC (BP.)

Voting and Company Information

BP. – BP plc Information and Vote Guidance 2024

AGM: 25th April 2024  Proxy deadline: 23rd April 2024 ShareSoc provide this added value voting information service for Full Members only, providing background information on leading companies and AGM vote guidance. Below are links to the: 1. Stockopedia summary report. 2. Minerva Vote recommendations for the 25th April 2024 AGM based on their standard template. 3. Minerva detailed research report for the AGM. Summary of voting issues at this year’s AGM  The Minerva report highlights various issues and recommends voting against two of the resolutions. Readers should make their own ...

BP. – BP Information and Vote Guidance 2023

AGM: 27 April 2023 Proxy deadline: 25 April 2023 ShareSoc provide this added value voting information service for Full Members only, providing background information on leading companies and AGM vote guidance. Below are links to the: 1. Stockopedia summary report. 2. Minerva Vote recommendations for the 27 April 2023 AGM based on their standard template. 3. Minerva detailed research report for the AGM. Summary of voting issues at this year’s AGM  The Minerva report highlights various issues in particular and recommends voting against two of the resolutions. Readers should make their own ...

BP – Company Information and Vote Guidance

by Cliff Weight, Director ShareSoc. These are my personal views and not necessarily those of ShareSoc. I own shares in BP and have held for >30 years, having first bought when the Government floated part of BP at 330p a share. I was about 30 years ago a (remuneration) consultant to BP and met their senior executives and directors and was very impressed. The share price did eventually get up to £6+ and there were good dividends, but then came the disaster ...

Blog posts

BP Shareholder Meeting 19 April 2023 – Report

This article reflects the opinions of its author and not necessarily those of ShareSoc. I attended the BP shareholder meeting on 19 April, held at the BP Head Office 1 St James’s Square, along with about 60 - 70 other shareholders. The meeting was organised by UKSA and ShareSoc members were also invited to attend.   The case for investing in BP shares is clear. They plan to grow ROACE to 18% with careful and limited capex split 50/50 between transition (green) energy ...

BP – Company Information and Vote Guidance

by Cliff Weight, Director ShareSoc. These are my personal views and not necessarily those of ShareSoc. I own shares in BP and have held for >30 years, having first bought when the Government floated part of BP at 330p a share. I was about 30 years ago a (remuneration) consultant to BP and met their senior executives and directors and was very impressed. The share price did eventually get up to £6+ and there were good dividends, but then came the disaster ...

A Review of my Portfolio in 2020

By Cliff Weight, ShareSoc Director Please note I am not qualified to give investment advice, and nothing in this blog constitutes advice. Overview Chris Spencer Phillips reported in a recent blog https://www.sharesoc.org/blog/investment-strategies/a-review-of-my-2020-share-portfolio-chris-spencer-phillips/ that his portfolio was up +80% in 2020, after being + 25% in 2019. Congrats and hats off to Chris. I cannot rival that, but I thought readers might find my review of 2020 of interest. My portfolio numbers for 2020 were: Everything – all equities, ISAs, SIPPs, OEICS, etc       ...

AGM – scope for change

There is an excellent FT article on AGMs  https://www.ft.com/content/1209fa2f-30a9-4a16-bcee-65743814acc2 (11 June 2020) which quotes me in some detail: Cliff Weight, from the individual shareholders group ShareSoc, says he is concerned that some companies see AGMs as a “waste of time and unnecessary, apart from the formalities” required by law. He fears some will use the disruption caused by the pandemic to rubber stamp bad practices, such as by making it harder for investors to question the board. ShareSoc believes a move towards live AGM ...

Market Crash and Abcam Impact from Coronavirus

This morning (9th March) my stock market portfolio was a sea of red – down 5.6% at the time of writing at 9.30 am.  Not only have most shares fallen, but spreads have widened so it’s not even easy to pick up those shares that are now undervalued at a fair price. I think the answer here is to wait until the immediate panic is over before making any more decisions to buy or sell. The major impacts on shares have been ...

Frying in Hell and Investing in Oil Companies

Last night and this morning, the national media were dominated by the news from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that we are all going to fry in a rapidly rising world temperature unless we change our ways. CO2 emissions continue to rise and even to limit temperature rises to 1.5 degrees Celsius requires unprecedented changes to many aspects of our lives. The suggested solutions are changes to transport to cut emissions, e.g. electric cars, eating less meat, growing more trees, ceasing ...

BP PLC Remuneration Policy – ShareSoc’s comments prior to the AGM

In preparation to BP’s AGM tomorrow (17th May 2017), ShareSoc's Remuneration spokesman has prepared this post on the company’s remuneration policy and many other issues. Overall, the changes proposed by the Company,should be considered positive. The discontinuation of the matching share awards and simplification is particularly welcomed, as is the downward discretion applied by the remuneration committee during the year to reduce pay. However, even after the reduction Dudley’s aggregate incentive forward-looking opportunity could still be deemed to be excessive at 725% of ...

BP – Pay Cut or Downward Discretion

I seem to be spending a lot of time talking about pay at companies of late. It would be better if we could concentrate on more important matters, like their strategy, the lack of productivity in UK companies, how they are revising their plans to cope with Brexit and exchange rate changes, and all those other matters that affect shareholder returns. But it seems everyone wants to talk about pay. So here's the latest story. The BP Annual Report has been published ...

Brexit Hangover, You’re Not Laughing Now

The markets falling, England lost to Iceland in a football match, and there is gloom and despondency everywhere. Much of the country seems to be in a post-party hangover. It therefore seems a good time to review the situation and try to give some explanations for what has been happening. Firstly, you have probably guessed, as did my local M.P. without me telling him, that I voted for Brexit. Je ne regrette rien, as one of our partners that we intend to ...

BP Remuneration Vote Lost

BP had 59% of shareholders voting AGAINST the Remuneration Resolution at their Annual General Meeting (AGM) on 14/4/2016 (and that's ignoring the abstentions which some institutions like to use to express dissatisfaction). This is what the Chairman had to say even before the vote was cast: "We know already from the proxies received and conversations with our institutional investors that there is real concern over the directors' pay in this challenging year for our shareholders. We have always judged executive performance not ...

2014 Review and New Year Resolutions

Now's the time of year to look back on the performance of the stock market in 2014, and look at plans for the future. Last year was undoubtedly a disappointing year for the UK stock market. The FTSE All-Share index was down 2.45%, worse than many other major markets. The cause was undoubtedly that the All-Share index is dominated by large mega-cap FTSE-100 companies such as BP, Shell, Glaxo and Tesco. The first two have been badly hit by the decline ...

BP and Shell facing climate change resolutions

Both BP and Shell are likely to face resolutions at their next AGMs which will raise the issue of climate change. A coalition of investment groups including ShareAction and the Local Authority Pension Fund (LAPF) are looking for signatories to a requisition for a resolution to require more reporting by these companies on various aspects of their approach to carbon reduction and emissions management. See http://www.lapfforum.org/news/co-filers-sought-for-2015-shell-and-bp-agm-resolutions for more information. Comment: Some investors feel that the Annual Reports of such companies are already ...

BP Annual General Meeting Report

With the AGM season now in full swing, it's worth pointing out that ShareSoc makes available many useful reports on such meetings. These are available to all ShareSoc subscribing members in an archive here. Below is an abbreviated sample of one by ShareSoc Chairman Stan Grierson on last weeks meeting of BP. THE BP AGM 2014 As always BP’s AGM is both the first and one of the biggest of the season, and took place at the ExCel Centre on Thursday 10th April. ...

AGM Reports

BP’s (BP.) AGM 2016

After all the media hype I found the crowd inside and out much bigger than in previous years. The outside hecklers this year were predominately lobbying against the extraction of oil and gas from the Great Barrier Reef area off Western Australia. In previous years they were “First Nationals”, complete with full head-dresses trying to preserve their Tar Sands areas in Northern Canada. I have gathered that the Tar Sands will remain untouched, and including Australians within this meeting who were ...

THE BP (BP.) AGM Report 2014

As always BP’s AGM is both the first and one of the biggest of the season, and took place at the ExCel Centre on Thursday 10th April. The large hall was well filled. The meeting started on time at 11:30 am and finished at about 2 pm. Opening remarks from the chairman Carl-Henric Svanberg and the CEO Bob Dudley gave a positive view of the company and they started taking questions in the order of items on the voting paper, which had ...

THE BP (BP.) AGM Report 2013

BP’s AGM is both the first and one of the biggest of the season, and took place at the ExCel Centre on Thursday 11th April. The large hall was well filled. The meeting started on time at 11:30 am and finished at 2:25 pm. The initial comments from the chairman Carl-Henric Svanberg and the CEO Bob Dudley were positive in explaining the recovery so far after the spill in the Gulf of Mexico, and the writer agrees that the recovery in the ...

ShareSoc News

BP. – BP plc Information and Vote Guidance 2024

AGM: 25th April 2024  Proxy deadline: 23rd April 2024 ShareSoc provide this added value voting information service for Full Members only, providing background information on leading companies and AGM vote guidance. Below are links to the: 1. Stockopedia summary report. 2. Minerva Vote recommendations for the 25th April 2024 AGM based on their standard template. 3. Minerva detailed research report for the AGM. Summary of voting issues at this year’s AGM  The Minerva report highlights various issues and recommends voting against two of the resolutions. Readers should make their own ...

BP. – BP Information and Vote Guidance 2023

AGM: 27 April 2023 Proxy deadline: 25 April 2023 ShareSoc provide this added value voting information service for Full Members only, providing background information on leading companies and AGM vote guidance. Below are links to the: 1. Stockopedia summary report. 2. Minerva Vote recommendations for the 27 April 2023 AGM based on their standard template. 3. Minerva detailed research report for the AGM. Summary of voting issues at this year’s AGM  The Minerva report highlights various issues in particular and recommends voting against two of the resolutions. Readers should make their own ...

ShareSoc Advises Investors to Vote Against BP Plc Remuneration Report

PRESS RELEASE 73 11/4/2016 ShareSoc (the UK Individual Shareholders Society) is advising its Members to vote against the Remuneration Report resolution at the forthcoming Annual General Meeting of BP. We consider the pay of the CEO to be simply too high, and particularly so in a year when the company suffered a record loss of $6.4 billion in 2015. Even so his pay went up by 20%. Part of the reason for the high pay was the excessively complex remuneration scheme.  Background The ...

ShareSoc and First Flight issue Recommended Code of Conduct for Non-Executive Directors

PRESS RELEASE 38 (7/11/2012) The importance of having active and competent Non-Executive Directors (including Chairmen) in public companies cannot be over emphasised. They can make all the difference between the long term success or failure of a business, and are crucial when a company faces short term difficulties. But many major corporate failures or near disasters such as RBS, BP, Northern Rock, AIG, Enron and more recently Olympus, News Corporation, Barclays etc have been assigned to an “inability of the Non-Execs to exercise influence ...

Corporate Remuneration Reports

BP Remuneration Report 2017

BP 2017 AGM Recommendation. Shareholders are advised to vote against the remuneration report and the new Policy at this company. BP - The Manifest report is attached. BP is graded E for Remuneration (on A to F scale!), which is pretty bad. Manifest reasons were: Report - Issues: No clearly identifiable link is noted between the performance measures used in the incentive pay elements and the key performance indicators identified in the business review. The level of the upper bonus cap for certain ...

BP 2015 REMUNERATION REVIEW

by Cliff Weight, 8th March 2016 SUMMARY The bonus has 6 performance measures, bonus is pensionable and the the LTI has 5 performance measures. Why is the CEO paid so much, when performance has been average at best over the long term? Why does the remuneration committee think the pay structure is simple when it is highly complex? CONTEXT The press coverage is simple. Pay up 20% when profits went down (See Appendix 1). BP was condemned by critics for being the latest example of ...