Disgraced former BP boss Bernard Looney forfeits £32m in pay and bonuses

BP last night concluded former chief executive Bernard Looney was guilty of ‘serious misconduct’ after a scandal over past relationships with colleagues.

The oil giant’s board led by industry veteran Helge Lund decided to strip Looney of £32million in pay and bonuses.

Looney quit in September after the scandal first erupted.

It marks a stunning fall from grace for the globe-trotting executive who launched his tenure of BP in 2020 with a plan to reinvent it for the net-zero age – and whose fortunes now lies in tatters.

The scandal centres on a probe launched last year by the BP board into claims about Looney from an anonymous source.

Serious misconduct: Shell’s board, led by industry veteran Helge Lund, decided to strip former chief exec Bernard Looney (pictured) of £32m in pay and bonuses

Looney at the time gave ‘assurances’ about his ‘past relationships with company colleagues and his future behaviour’, BP said.

But in September this year, following further similar allegations, it launched a fresh investigation and Looney ‘informed the company that he had not been fully transparent in those assurances’.

BP said: ‘Following careful consideration, the board has concluded that, in providing inaccurate and incomplete assurances in July 2022, Looney knowingly misled the board.

‘The board has determined that this amounts to serious misconduct.’

BP said Looney’s lawyers had been informed of the decision on his pay. A spokesman for the former boss did not immediately comment.

The cost of the scandal to the former oil boss dwarfs the sums that have been stripped from other toppled UK bosses. 

Dame Alison Rose missed out on £7.6million after she quit NatWest in the wake of a de-banking row with Nigel Farage.

And Barclays last year froze around £22million in bonuses for its former boss Jes Staley, who is embroiled in an investigation into his links to the late paedophile Jeffrey Epstein.

In the US the sums involved in such cases have been bigger.

Former NBC Universal boss Jeff Shell missed out on a £34million stock award after being fired for having an inappropriate relationship with a CNBC presenter.

And Steve Easterbrook, the British former chief executive of McDonald’s, handed back £84million in severance pay after he was fired in a probe over his relationships with employees. 

The £32million being stripped from Looney includes a series of share awards worth up to £27million.

He will also miss out on £1.3million in salary and pension allowance for the balance of his notice period and an annual bonus for this year worth up to £3.3million. 

In addition, BP is clawing back previously paid out bonuses worth more than £900,000.

That reflects the board’s decision that Looney should not retain any bonuses ‘relating to service following the date of the misleading assurances he gave to the board’.

Looney’s departure has thrown the company into turmoil at a time when it had been reinventing itself with a plan to achieve net zero emissions by 2050 and invest billions in renewable energy and low carbon power.

But earlier this year it scaled back plans to reduce its oil and gas production.

Interim chief executive Murray Auchincloss, who has stepped in as BP searches for a permanent new boss, has insisted that its drive to go green remains on track, saying ‘one person leaving does not change the strategy’. 

In October, BP reported a 60 per cent fall in third-quarter profits amid falling oil prices. Auchincloss dismissed speculation that it could become a takeover target.

Looney grew up on a farm in Ireland and joined BP as a drill engineer in 1991.

As he rose the ranks he worked across the company’s global operations including in Alaska, the Gulf of Mexico, Vietnam and the North Sea.

He divorced his wife of two years, Jacqueline Hurst, shortly before he became chief executive at the oil giant.

She reportedly later claimed that he dumped her via WhatsApp.

This post first appeared on Dailymail.co.uk