Thirty-Three Days at BP
Albert Manifold was hired to help remake BP and removed just thirty-three days after shareholders confirmed him as chairman. His fall exposed a deeper struggle over the company’s strategy, board and future direction.
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Born in August 1963 and raised in Templeogue in south Dublin, Albert Manifold grew up in a family where business was part of everyday life. His parents ran a hardware shop in nearby Kimmage, so buying, selling, negotiating and keeping customers were familiar long before he entered a boardroom. He was competitive too, playing prop forward at Templeogue College, before training as an accountant and moving through finance and private equity.
In 1998, Manifold joined CRH, the Irish building materials group that was already expanding internationally but had yet to become the global giant it would later be. The move quickly took him far from Dublin. Within days of joining, he was sent to Ukraine, where CRH was trying to build business in a market in which it had little established presence. The work was practical and unglamorous: finding customers, identifying who really made the decisions and building relationships from scratch. One of those early relationships would eventually develop into an important account for the company.
That beginning offered an early glimpse of the executive Manifold would become: persistent, commercially aggressive and comfortable operating in unfamiliar markets. Over the next quarter of a century, he rose through CRH and became one of the central figures in its transformation, spending his final eleven years there as chief executive.
By the time he stepped down, CRH had become one of the world’s leading building materials groups. During Manifold’s years as chief executive, its market capitalisation rose from around $19 billion to about $50 billion and its share price increased several-fold. The portfolio was repeatedly reshaped through acquisitions and disposals, the group became increasingly focused on the faster-growing North American market, and its primary listing moved from London to New York. He left with a reputation as a hard-driving industrial leader who was willing to make large decisions, simplify complex businesses and act decisively when he believed the portfolio needed to change.
For BP, which was struggling, in need of a new Chair and under pressure from one of the world’s most formidable activist investors, the attraction was easy to understand. Manifold was not an oil man, but he had spent much of his career doing exactly what many investors believed BP needed: simplifying a complex international group, reshaping its portfolio, cutting through internal complexity, making difficult strategic choices and concentrating the business on the markets offering the strongest returns. BP, by contrast, had spent years drifting between strategies, underperforming its major peers and losing credibility with investors, while leadership changes and boardroom upheaval compounded its problems. The company did not simply need a safe pair of hands; it needed someone willing to take it apart and put it back together. The appointment of a proven industrial reformer made obvious sense.
On 23 April 2026, Manifold reached one of the defining moments of his career. After nearly three decades at CRH, culminating in more than a decade as chief executive, he was asking shareholders to confirm him as chairman of BP, for all its recent travails, one of Britain’s most iconic companies and one of the best-known industrial names in the world. It was a remarkable final chapter to an already impressive corporate career.
Yet there was something ominous about the voting of BP’s shareholders that day. For a company of BP’s size and sophistication, the scale of the dissent suggested that an important section of BP’s shareholder base had either not been properly consulted, had not been successfully persuaded or, more troublingly, was beginning to split from the board over the future direction of the company. Almost one in five votes were cast against Manifold. Just as bad, a proposal from the board to retire earlier climate-related shareholder resolutions was defeated, while another shareholder resolution challenged BP to explain more fully how its renewed investment in oil and gas would deliver returns. The votes were about different things and came from investors with different concerns, but together they gave the first clear sense of a company entering a more confrontational phase with parts of its own shareholder base.
Thirty-three days later, BP removed Manifold with immediate effect, officially over concerns about governance, oversight and conduct, allegations that Manifold refutes. Underneath, however, a much bigger battle over BP’s direction and who would ultimately control it was rapidly moving into the open.
Manifold’s arrival at BP appeared to signal that the company was finally ready to move decisively away from one of the most radical strategic experiments undertaken by any oil major. The direction of travel had already changed, but a harder reset promised to turn that change into something more permanent. What was less clear was whether all of BP’s shareholders were prepared to follow it that far.
The tensions visible at the AGM had actually been building for years. BP had already started to retreat from its earlier transition strategy under Murray Auchincloss, but the reset was cautious and incomplete. The board appeared to be trying to walk a tightrope: moving far enough back towards oil and gas to satisfy investors demanding better returns, while stopping short of a full break with the transition strategy that still commanded support from an important section of the shareholder base. The result was a company changing direction without ever quite resolving where it was trying to go.
Manifold’s arrival threatened to end that ambiguity. His record suggested a man more comfortable making choices than balancing competing constituencies, and his early actions pointed towards a harder and more permanent restructuring. That was likely to be welcomed by some shareholders, but deeply uncomfortable for others. The compromise that had held BP together was starting to look increasingly fragile: the company could not indefinitely behave like a conventional oil major while still trying to preserve the assumptions and commitments of its transition strategy. Sooner or later, it would have to choose, and the disagreement over BP’s future was becoming a struggle over who would make that choice.
The argument had its roots in the years when the energy transition appeared to be moving in one irresistible direction. Capital poured into clean-energy businesses, ESG became embedded in the investment policies of the world’s largest financial institutions, and corporate boards came under increasing pressure to demonstrate that their strategies were aligned with a lower-carbon future. BP embraced that moment more completely than any of its major peers. In 2020, it set out not simply to reduce emissions or add new businesses around the edges, but to remake the company itself: shrinking oil and gas production while building a new growth platform around renewables and other transition businesses.
BP did not make that choice in isolation. Bernard Looney believed in the strategy and the board under then Chair Helge Lund supported it, but the company was also moving with a powerful institutional tide. In 2019, the year before the strategy was unveiled, 99.14% of votes cast at BP’s AGM supported a Climate Action 100+ resolution requiring the company to explain how its strategy was consistent with the Paris Agreement. BP’s own board backed the resolution.
The personnel around the board table have changed since then, but the present board is not divorced from that period. Several directors who remain central to BP’s governance joined during the years when the transition strategy was being embedded, implemented and defended. The board now overseeing BP’s retreat from that strategy therefore carries some continuity with the institution that lived with it, supported it and, for several years, tried to make it work.
The 2019 vote did not instruct BP to cut production by a particular amount, build a particular renewable business or spend a particular sum outside oil and gas. Those decisions belonged to management and the board. But the atmosphere surrounding them was crucial. When almost the entire shareholder vote appeared to be pointing in one direction, and the board was pointing the same way, moving aggressively became much easier. The risks of going too slowly were obvious; the risks of going too far were much harder to see, but they would soon become very real.
With hindsight, BP looks to have blundered badly, but the reality is that it was being pushed in that direction from almost every side. Financial markets were reinforcing the message: clean-energy shares were booming, ESG investment was expanding and low interest rates favoured businesses whose value depended heavily on growth far into the future. For BP, which had spent years struggling to close the valuation gap with the strongest oil majors, the attraction may have been especially powerful. The transition offered not simply a different mix of assets, but the possibility of escaping a competition in which BP had struggled to distinguish itself and becoming something the market might value differently.
It is worth asking whether BP went further than its peers not only because it had greater faith in the speed of the transition, but because it had less faith in its own ability to win as a conventional oil company. The full-scale transition strategy offered BP a route towards becoming something new, rather than continuing the harder and less glamorous task of trying to become a better version of what it already was.
For a time, management, the board, shareholders and financial markets were broadly aligned. Then the world changed. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine returned security of supply to the centre of energy policy, inflation and higher interest rates altered project economics, and oil and gas businesses generated extraordinary amounts of cash. The transition continued, but the confidence that politics, finance, technology and consumers would all move smoothly in the same direction did not.
The consequences spread far beyond BP. Companies and financial institutions across the economy were frantically trying to reconcile strategies and commitments formed in one period with a world that had become far less straightforward. Some of the largest financial institutions stepped back from collective net-zero initiatives. Asset managers and pension funds found themselves pulled between clients and beneficiaries demanding stronger climate action, those demanding better returns and many expecting both. For a period, it had been convenient to assume those objectives would always align. Increasingly, they did not.
BP felt that conflict more sharply than most because it had gone further. It had more to reverse, and the reversal itself began exposing divisions that had been easier to conceal while the company, its board and most of its shareholders appeared to be moving in the same direction.
By 2025, BP had announced what it called a “fundamental reset”, increasing planned oil and gas investment while reducing spending on transition businesses. Fundamental, perhaps, by the standards of the company BP had become; by the standards of a conventional oil major, the shift was much less dramatic. Under Murray Auchincloss, the reset remained measured rather than revolutionary. The board appeared to be trying to satisfy investors demanding better returns and a stronger core oil and gas business while avoiding a complete break with the transition strategy that still retained support among an important part of the shareholder base.
That compromise was becoming increasingly difficult to sustain. Manifold’s arrival suggested that BP might finally be prepared to choose a clearer direction and make the harder decisions that followed from it. The AGM exposed just how much resistance such a move could provoke.
Resolution 23 was formally about retiring climate-related shareholder resolutions passed in 2015 and 2019. BP argued that the older requirements had been overtaken by changes in reporting and created unnecessary duplication. Opponents believed important disclosures could be lost and objected more broadly to the direction in which BP was moving. The company needed 75% support. It did not even receive a simple majority.
The opposition included significant institutions. Legal & General Investment Management opposed the proposal, as did local-authority pension investors, while ISS and Glass Lewis recommended opposition to parts of the board’s agenda. Norges Bank Investment Management, one of BP’s largest shareholders, took the other side and supported Manifold and the board-backed proposals. The fractures that had been hidden behind years of apparent consensus were becoming visible.
Resolution 24 exposed another layer of the problem. It asked BP to provide more information on the returns and discipline behind its increased oil and gas spending and received support from around a quarter of shareholders. To me, the vote also looked like institutional investors trying to satisfy their own constituencies: showing clients and beneficiaries that they were not simply waving through a return to oil and gas, even as the economics and politics of the transition were becoming harder to navigate.
The dividing lines were not perfectly neat, but they were becoming hard to ignore. One part of the shareholder base remained determined to hold BP to transition commitments and maintain scrutiny of its return towards oil and gas. Another had concluded that the experiment had failed, BP remained too complex and expensive, and the company needed a much harder restructuring around the businesses where it could actually compete and make money. Between them sat institutions trying to reconcile climate commitments with changing economics and demands for returns.
For BP’s board, that was already a difficult balancing act. The danger was that the same division was beginning to appear inside the company.
Amanda Blanc, BP’s senior independent director and chief executive of Aviva, came from the institutional world in which ESG policy, climate commitments and stakeholder expectations remained deeply embedded. Manifold came from a very different corporate tradition, built around restructuring, acquisitions, disposals and decisive portfolio choices. Their backgrounds alone prove nothing about what either wanted in private, but Manifold’s actions suggested that he was not prepared to preserve BP’s uneasy compromise indefinitely.
He moved quickly. The board was reduced in size and further reductions were reportedly under consideration. Director tenure was being reviewed. He was pushing for lower costs and faster change, while also engaging with Elliott, which had become one of BP’s largest shareholders and wanted a more aggressive overhaul of the company.
Those meetings later became part of the controversy surrounding his departure. Reuters reported that Manifold had met Elliott without the direct knowledge of other directors, although it was reported that BP’s investor relations team knew of the discussions. The same reporting suggested that he shared much of Elliott’s diagnosis: BP was too expensive, too complicated and needed to move faster towards its core oil and gas businesses.
Meeting an important shareholder, reducing a large board and challenging costs are not, individually, remarkable acts for a chairman. Together, however, they suggest something more significant. Manifold may have concluded that changing BP’s strategy was not enough; if the change was to survive, the balance of power on the board also had to change.
He had arrived with a record of remaking companies and found himself chairing a board with considerable continuity from the years in which BP had embraced the transition and then cautiously retreated from it. He had begun reducing its size, was reportedly considering going further and appeared aligned on many issues with the shareholder pressing hardest for radical change. The problem was that the directors around him still had the power to remove him.
Thirty-three days after the AGM, they did. The conduct dispute may have been real, but so too may have been a deeper struggle over the pace and control of change at BP; the two were not necessarily separate. Whatever happened behind closed doors, the result was unmistakable. Manifold was gone and the board he had tried to reshape remained, while Amanda Blanc retained a central role in the aftermath and in the search for the next permanent Chair. Ian Tyler was appointed interim Chair and has since reportedly expressed interest in the permanent position.
The choice of BP’s next Chair therefore goes far beyond restoring calm. The successful candidate will sit between a new chief executive trying to impose greater discipline, directors who have just removed their own chairman, institutional shareholders pulling in different directions and an activist investor demanding faster change. More importantly, the next Chair will have enormous influence over the future composition of the board itself.
That is where the struggle for BP now leads. Shareholders can vote against directors, requisition resolutions, publish plans and threaten a proxy battle. Executives can announce targets, sell assets and reorganise divisions. But lasting power sits with the board: it appoints and removes chief executives, approves the largest decisions and controls the gradual renewal of its own membership.
For shareholders who believe BP still needs a much harder transformation, winning the argument over strategy is therefore not enough. They need enough influence over the board to make the change durable. Manifold may have understood that. In the hardest reading of events, he tried to change BP while the people he needed to change still held the votes required to remove him.
He may have lost, but the wider struggle has not ended. BP is an extreme example of a much broader problem: companies and financial institutions built strategies, policies and boards during a period when the direction of the energy transition appeared clearer than it does today, but the world changed and shareholders, directors, executives and beneficiaries have not changed their minds at the same speed or by the same amount.
At BP, the consequences are unusually visible because it is an oil company, because it went further than its peers, because it had further to reverse and because it is now trying to transform itself again while its owners are still arguing over what they want it to become. For Albert Manifold, 23 April should have marked the beginning of a final great chapter in an extraordinary career. Instead, the votes that day offered an early glimpse of a conflict already moving towards the boardroom. Thirty-three days later he was gone, but the struggle over BP was not.
