Bp

In 2014, Rolf Harris was convicted of sexual offences against girls. I wrote in this space that this would have represented more of a cultural change in the treatment of celebrities if he had been unmasked at the height of his fame. Current stars, I suggested, are much more rarely denounced: ‘I would not dream of suggesting that Russell Brand is a sex criminal, but we know, from his own account, that he has slept with a great many women.’ He had even, on his infamous Radio 2 show, boasted of sleeping with Andrew Sachs’s grand-daughter, yet ‘the BBC broadcast this as comedy’. ‘If the celebrity wheel of fortune ever went

When is money so soiled that merely accepting it makes you tainted? It has been reported today that the National Portrait Gallery (NPG) and Scottish Ballet are ending their sponsorship deals with the oil and gas company BP following years of protests. Climate activists argue that these sponsorships launder the reputations of those responsible for despoiling the planet. BP has long been a significant arts sponsor; the NPG’s annual portrait exhibition has been supported by the company since 1989. And in 2016 BP announced renewed sponsorship deals with the British Museum, NPG, the Royal Opera House and the Royal Shakespeare Company, pledging a total of £7.5 million over five years,

It is often said that Western culture worships youth. Yet this cult of youth worship has started to mutate into something a bit weirder, as it increasingly seems that ours is a society that now worships children. This year, for instance, has seen the rise to global ascendency of the 16-year-old Swede, Greta Thunberg. She has become the child-saint icon of the environmental movement, whose apocalyptic scorn is fawned over by liberal politicians and woke-conscious big business. Her teenage acolytes bunk school, with the blessing of their teachers, to raise awareness as to the plight of climate change. Elsewhere, we are told that it is imperative to hold a second

‘Turbocharging’: sounds exciting, doesn’t it? Two weeks ago, I noted that our incoming PM had deployed this power-word — with its subliminal reminder of his pedal-to-the-metal reputation as the former motoring correspondent of GQ — to describe what ‘free ports’ would do to regional economies. Since then, it has clearly been scrawled on Dominic Cummings’s Downing Street whiteboard: Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab and Chief Secretary to the Treasury Rishi Sunak were also bandying it around this week. In one sense it just seems to mean ‘energising’; in another, I suspect it’s a synonym for something no free-market cheerleader for the new cabinet would ever admit is a good thing: a

Among the numbers attached to the restructuring of Deutsche Bank announced by Chief Executive Christian Sewing this week, the 18,000 job cull is most startling. But others tell the story just as vividly. First, the fact that the venerable institution, a pillar of Germany’s post-war economic resurgence, had raised €30 billion of new equity in the past decade in pursuit of a dream of becoming ‘Europe’s Goldman Sachs’ — but that sum is double its current shrivelled market capitalisation. Second, its most recent investment banking boss Garth Ritchie is leaving with an €11 million payoff, having collected ‘about €36 million’ over three years in which it became obvious his division

I usually take a stern view of corporate pay packets that are out of line with profits and shareholder value, but I’m prepared to make an exception for Bob Dudley. The American-born chief executive of BP collected $19.6 million last year, up 20 per cent on his 2014 remuneration, while the embattled oil giant clocked up a record loss of $6.5 billion and shed thousands of jobs. But even in the rugged world of oil and gas, few men have survived tougher career challenges than Dudley, who in his previous role as head of the Russian joint venture TNK-BP was so threatened by hostile locals that he had to operate from

All in all, this is an odd moment for an outburst of high spirits: not from me — I’m as phlegmatic as ever — but from commodity investors. The price of a barrel of oil has rallied from $27 to $40 after talks between Saudi Arabia and Russia about restricting supply; one pundit called that ‘meaningless theatre’ but others expect a climb back to $50. In a similar mood, copper prices have risen by almost a fifth — reflecting producer cutbacks combined with a belief that the Chinese downturn in demand might not be so severe as was first feared. Likewise iron ore, which surged so fast at the beginning

Despite being the heiress to a steel fortune, Margaret Hodge never stops criticising multinational corporations over their tax affairs including the use of offshore havens and complex company schemes that befuddle the taxman. BP, for example, reportedly has 85 subsidiaries in a variety of tax havens built up over many years. That has not stopped moaning Margaret taking a hefty £8,000 donation from Bryan Sanderson. Who is he? Well, he is the former BP director, who worked at the company for over three decades.

Here’s one for all you conspiracy nuts out there, prompted by readers’ comments on my recent item about whether BP has been unjustly targeted by the US political and judicial establishment. I gather there’s a theory that the hounding of non-US banks by the US Department of Justice for sanctions-busting and trading misdemeanours has a more sinister foreign-policy impetus behind it. Notably — according to Conflicts Forum, a website I’m told is breakfast reading for trainee spooks — the $9 billion fine imposed by US authorities on BNP of France for financing trade with Iran, Sudan and Cuba may also have been intended to punish the French for refusing to

I should declare two connections before I start offering opinions about the latest US judgment against BP relating to the ‘Macondo’ disaster — the explosion on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig and subsequent spillage in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010. The first is that I’m occasionally invited to interview BP executives for its in-house magazine. That doesn’t mean I’m in their camp, but it does mean I have had the opportunity to discuss Macondo with, among others, chairman Carl-Henrik Svanberg, and I did not think he was merely parroting the corporate line when he told me, ‘We’re not going to let people take advantage of us, but we’re going to

Iain Conn, who will succeed Sam Laidlaw as chief executive of Centrica, would have been a dead cert for the top job at his current employer, BP, were it not for the Deepwater Horizon oil rig disaster in the Gulf of Mexico in April 2010. The subsequent PR fiasco terminated the BP career of the then chief executive Tony Hayward — who seemed crushed by the episode, but recovered to make a double fortune at Genel Energy and Glencore. Had Hayward served a full term, Conn (BP’s head of refining and marketing) would almost certainly have followed him. As it was, BP found it more politic to appoint an American,