BP on guard over agm protests

13 April 2012

ONE of the biggest bun-fights in the City calendar takes place today with environmental campaigners once more threatening to cast a shadow over BP's annual meeting.

Hordes of police and blanket security checks will greet more than 1,500 of the oil giant's shareholders as they flock to London's Royal Festival Hall.

Last year, protesters broke through the massed ranks of BP guards to drop stink bombs in the foyer while two campaigners were frogmarched out of the meeting after heckling chairman Peter Sutherland.

A special resolution this year calls on BP to prepare an exhaustive report on its strategy for drilling in or carrying oil across ecologically sensitive areas of the world such as the Arctic Wildlife Refuge.

Fears have been stoked by BP's work on the controversial Baku-Tblisi-Ceyhan pipeline designed to export oil from the Caspian Sea across Turkey, Georgia and Azerbaijan. Resolution-17 has been tabled by pressure groups that are also BP shareholders, including the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust.

Influential asset management-firm ISIS has given its backing to BP, but has conceded the group could be more transparent in its policy of operating in such areas.

Little opposition is expected to BP's remuneration report despite the increase in chief executive Lord Browne's overall pay package last year to £4.8m from £3.9m in 2002.

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