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BP chair Helge Lund will step down in an “inevitable” move after a bruising tenure in which the oil major tried to pivot away from fossil fuels only to reverse course this year amid pressure from activist investor Elliott Management.
The FTSE 100 company said on Friday that Lund had notified the board of his plan to step down, “most likely during 2026”. The search for a successor would be led by Dame Amanda Blanc, the board’s senior independent director, BP added.
Lund’s departure comes after BP in February ditched a radical five-year-old strategy to reinvent itself as a green energy company. The shift followed news that Elliott had built a near 5 per cent stake in the company and was pushing for sweeping changes after a long a period of underperformance.
Despite BP abandoning its targets to cut oil and gas output and increase renewable power generation, Elliott felt the plans did not go far enough and has since canvassed the opinions of other BP shareholders, according to people with knowledge of those conversations.
One long-standing BP shareholder who spoke with Elliott over the past few weeks said the hedge fund had been critical of the BP chair but had stopped short of calling for his departure.
“They weren’t keen on Lund, that is true, but Lund’s time was up, he’d been there for seven years,” the shareholder said. “This was inevitable.”
Elliott declined to comment.
By announcing the succession plan now, BP may be seeking to avoid a vote against Lund’s re-election at its annual general meeting on April 17, two top-30 shareholders said, adding that they were likely to have voted against his reappointment.
“He oversaw the U-turn [in 2020] and if he got it wrong the first time, he doesn’t convey a sense of urgency about getting it right the second time,” one of the shareholders said. “In meetings with investors, the future of this company is on the line and he has a very diffident manner, it’s almost as if he’s choosing what sandwich to have.”
BP told the Financial Times it had met about three-quarters of its institutional shareholders since February and had received broad support for its new plan, and a request to focus on executing and delivering it at pace. “The issue of the chair has not been one that has been brought up consistently like those other messages,” a spokesperson said.
Lund, who was previously chief executive of Norway’s Equinor and gas company BG Group, was given two main responsibilities when he took over as BP’s chair in 2019: to select a chief executive and to oversee the development of a new strategy to guide BP through the energy transition.
His efforts on both fronts have run into trouble. Lund’s pick for chief executive, Bernard Looney, was dismissed for failing to fully disclose to the board past relationships with BP colleagues in 2023. Then the aggressive shift into renewables, which he steered with Looney, was finally abandoned in February.
Lund picked chief financial officer Murray Auchincloss to replace Looney as CEO but the Canadian executive has so far failed to turn around BP’s lacklustre performance. Like Lund, Auchincloss is closely associated with the previous strategy and has struggled to win back investor confidence even as he has re-emphasised oil and gas production over the past 15 months.
Some shareholders have also questioned how Lund has split his time between BP and Novo Nordisk, the Danish drugmaker he has chaired since 2018 and whose share price has halved since last summer.
Last month Lund announced that BP would hire two new directors, expanding its board to 12 people in what was seen by some as an attempt to shore up his own position in the face Elliott’s activism.
But after reversing the strategy to focus on green energy, other members of BP’s board recognised that Lund’s position had become untenable, according to a person familiar with some board members’ thinking.
“We don’t expect many to be surprised by this announcement,” said Biraj Borkhataria, an analyst at RBC Capital Markets. “To several investors we have spoken to, Helge was seen as the chief architect of the prior strategy, while he also appointed the previous CEO, which ultimately led to material share price underperformance over many years.”
In a statement, Lund said: “Now is the right time to start the process to find my successor and enable an orderly and seamless handover.”
Blanc said she would lead a “comprehensive search” for “candidates with the credibility and relevant experience to lead the board and continue driving management’s safe execution of the reset strategy”.
Additional reporting by Costas Mourselas in London
