Albert Manifold

And it's time for me to move away.

What happened with the appointment of Albert Manifold and then the departure?

I'm not...

Look, I think there's been a lot said about this and there's no more for me to say today on BP.

Mm-hmm.

Then it was Albert Manifold and Mr. Auchincloss as a partnership.

[chuckles] Then in twenty twenty-six, Mr.

Manifold and Meg O'Neill.

Mr. Auchincloss w-was promoted from CFO, did a, well, reasonably safe pair of hands, but d-didn't have that kind of leadership magic and was seen as being too close to Looney.

And now you've got Meg O'Neill coming in, who is generally considered a former Exxon American, um, thought of as a tough operator, cut her teeth at Exxon and then work-worked in Australia, and she's been brought in to steady the ship.

Albert Manifold, again, hard-charging, demanding Irish boss who ran a construction materials company for a long time.

He was discharged through accusations of bullying and overbearing conduct, claims that he denied.

So a guy called Ian Tyler, who had been kind of filling that role since May.

As you say, his predecessor, Albert Manifold, who'd come from a big construction company called CRH, had kind of left under a bit of a cloud with kind of allegations of bullying and So it was all a bit messy for BP and it's, you know, BP is a company that's had kind of probably more than its fair share of difficult times in recent years.

So, you know, it wasn't helpful to have had that.

And I think you can sort of see why they might have gone for a bit more of a known quantity because of that.

BP has said sort of to address fears he might be wearing sort of one of worn too many hats have suggested he's going to review some of these external commitments.

So you probably see him kind of pull back from at least one or two of those.

I suppose the only kind of risk is that he's seen as too conservative a pick because, you know, a big factor in bringing Manifold in in the first place was to kind of shake things up a bit because the business had gone off course.

This kind of big green strategy hadn't really worked out.

Hopefully, uh, for them it'll be a period of, of some stability after a lot of upheaval, um, in the boardroom.

So this all comes after BP unexpectedly fired their previous chair, Albert Manifold.

That was in May, and that was, uh, after only eight months in the role.

He said he was let go without explanation.