Call for BP’s Browne to stay on

Following is a letter sent to Editor of The Sunday Times:

Sir,

BP shareholders need to realize that if their company has no obvious successors for CEO Brown, Lord Browne and the BP board have failed in their most important task, which is to have a number of potential candidates ready to run the company (¨Call for BP’s Browne to stay on¨ The Sunday Times, July 23, 2006).

It is absurd to think that there is only one man that can run BP and, going for an outsider, may be just what the company needs.

Let us not forget that there have been some significant black spots during Lord Browne´s watch, not least of which include BP´s disastrous environmental and safety performance, or lack thereof, in the US in recent years.

Onésimo Alvarez-Moro

See article:
A leading shareholder in BP is calling for the company to lift its mandatory retirement age of 60 so that chief executive Lord Browne can stay on at the oil giant.

Co-operative Insurance Society (CIS), which owns 1% of BP, intends to raise the matter at next year’s annual meeting if informal talks in the next few months do not yield the results it wants.

Ian Jones, CIS’s head of corporate governance, said: “We want the compulsory retirement age removed. To forcibly retire is not necessarily in shareholder interests. We would be unhappy about Browne’s retirement being forced in that way.”

Under BP’s rules, Browne must retire as chief executive in February 2008 when he turns 60. The succession issue has already come under the spotlight after Browne said he hoped to play a key role in choosing his replacement.

See full Article.