BP has appointed Murray Auchincloss as its chief executive, looking to draw a line under the messy and still murky exit of his predecessor, Bernard Looney. The former CEO resigned in September 2023, when it emerged he had misled the board over previous relationships with BP colleagues. Three months later, he was dismissed and stripped of £32 million in potential compensation. After five months, he was replaced by his right-hand man.
So what? Questions remain. Not so much for Looney, as the corporate board dealing with human issues – honesty, privacy, power, pay, love, loyalty and sex in a company where many people spend most of their adult lives.
- What did they know when they appointed him CEO?
- Why have they left BP employees to speculate about what actually happened?
- Did the punishment fit the crime?
- How much was this about how he ran his life – or the company?
- Have they got the right man in Auchincloss this time?
BP’s market cap has fallen to £77 billion. Shell’s, by comparison, is £160 billion. But BP still contributed 0.79 per cent of UK GDP in 2022, it employs over 15,000 people and it has long been the gro-bag of UK business leadership: Tufan Erganbilgiç, CEO of Rolls Royce; Rick Haythornthwaite, chair of Natwest; Dame Vivienne Cox, chair of Vallourec; the list goes on.
What BP has said. Looney was appointed in 2020. In the summer of 2022, he was asked to give assurances to the board about past relationships with colleagues in the company. In September 2023, BP announced that he was resigning with immediate effect after informing the board that he’d not been fully transparent. In December, the board fired him for serious misconduct, saying that he had “knowingly misled” them. It cancelled future share awards and demanded he pay back half of his 2022 bonus.
With so little said, questions swirled. When did the relationships happen, was it while he was CEO? Were past lovers promoted and other candidates thwarted? And for everyone else: who do you have to tell and when? What if the relationship itself is a secret – not ideal, but not uncommon? There has been heaps of speculation. Most of it wrong.
What happened. Looney joined BP in 1991 and was married from 2017 to 2019. During his 32 years at BP, he was widely known to have had relationships with women working at the company.
- February 2020: Looney is appointed and is understood to have informed Helge Lund, the chairman, that he had had relationships with two women, whom he identified.
- May 2022: an anonymous letter-writer informed the board of two further relationships and claimed Looney had promoted a colleague he had previously dated. Looney then informed Lund of those two further cases. He gave written assurances and apparently explained that he had not identified them because they were so historic.
- Summer of 2023: the board was contacted again. Looney confirmed a fifth relationship that he had not disclosed in order to protect their identity. It is understood that none of the relationships occurred during his time as CEO. Lund was said to be furious at having been misled.
BP’s board has had to deal with competing values. Transparency and privacy, for example. It has been determined to protect the identity of the women involved. It is unequivocal that there has been no favouritism in appointments: “Any suggestion that personal relationships play a role in professional advancement for women in bp demeans the talent, skills and experience of women working throughout the company; women in bp get promoted because they are good at their jobs. bp follows rigorous hiring and talent management processes – promotions and appointments are not made solely at the behest of any single executive.”
Background checks. At least one major shareholder has asked whether the board conducted sufficient due diligence when selecting Looney to run the company in late 2019. A former high-ranking employee described his reputation for dating colleagues as “prolific” during the time he was chief of staff to former CEO John Browne, with “a notch on almost every office door in the building”. Considering the amount of time and money the company spent on the process, critics wonder how much the board knew.
Separately from the Looney debacle, employees have also raised questions about
- The circumstances surrounding the resignation of BP’s top executive in the US, Dave Lawler, less than three weeks after Looney.
- The alleged use of private jets by a member of the senior leadership team to travel frequently between London and Europe. In response to claims, BP said that leases on corporate jets were used when necessary for business purposes and not for leaders to commute.
- The company’s strategy. Last year, amid significant pressure from investors, Looney and Auchincloss scaled back plans to cut oil and gas production. Is the pivot to green energy less of a priority now?
Auchincloss’s job is to change the storyline from reputation to performance. He’ll also have to contend with some early hurdles: last month lawyers for the BP Pension Fund wrote to the company’s board asking why the retirement income of 2,600 of its members hadn’t kept pace with rises in inflation. The row has made it to parliament.
Auchincloss was not considered ever likely to become CEO when Looney was first appointed; now the former CFO is in charge. He too found romance at BP, but properly declared his relationship back in 2020 when he became CFO.
Being People. The board may think it has handled conflicting responsibilities as well as it could have; it’s left everyone with a lot to talk about at the pump.
