Trouble at the top as BP looks to new management to re-energise fortunes

With Venezuelan oil on the table, the firm faces tough decisions before its new CEO arrives.

- By Jeevan Vasagar and Barney Macintyre

Meg O’Neill will become the first female chief executive of BP in April.

(Alamy)

In late 2024, a year into his tenure as chief executive of BP, Murray Auchincloss sat down with advisers and began hatching a plan for a strategy reset, to be launched at an investor day in New York in the new year.

After the abrupt departure of his predecessor Bernard Looney in September 2023, for failing to fully disclose relationships with colleagues, interim boss Auchincloss was under pressure from shareholders to steady the tanker and boost BP's ailing share price.

A source close to Auchincloss warned him: "If you don't do something pretty quick, you're going to have activists in there, because the strategy has failed and you need to change it pretty fast."

Sure enough, days before the planned event, news broke that activist investor Elliott Management had taken a near 5% stake in the company. To complicate matters further, Auchincloss had undergone a major medical procedure the month before. BP was forced to delay the investor day and relocate the event to London. Shares dropped 3% on the morning the change was announced.

Auchincloss put in a stalwart performance on the day, repeatedly vowing to "fundamentally reset" the company. But it was too late. The process to find his replacement had already started.

Elliott Management continued to make demands, and there was a feeling that Auchincloss was not acting with enough urgency. A former BP employee compared it with the response of Disney chief executive Bob Iger to activists: "When [Nelson] Peltz went after Disney, Iger said: 'OK, you want to go after me — I’m going to beat you at your game. For everything you think I should be doing, I want to do more of it faster. There was not that approach from Murray."