socialgandhi

You wouldn’t have his job for a pension, or would you?

On the day it was announced that BP chief executive Tony Hayward will get an immediate annual pension worth about £600,000 and a year’s salary plus benefits worth more than £1m ($930,000) when he leaves in October for ‘special projects’ in Russia, it’s not so good news for the rest of us on the pensions front.

With British Petroleum making up 7pc of the FTSE All Share Index and paying out around 15pc of all the dividend income in Britain, the impact on pension funds, investment funds and your child’s trust fund could mean that we all have some ‘exposure’ to BP’s disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, without even knowing it.

Luckily Mr Hayward’s pension pot is valued at about £11m and he will keep his rights to shares under a long-term performance scheme which could – depending on BP’s stock market recovery – eventually be worth several million pounds…in spite of the fact that tomorrow his company is set to post the largest quarterly loss by a UK firm in history!

This from a man who when he became chief executive in 2007, said his number-one task was to focus “laser-like” on safety and reliability.

Got to admire BP’s corporate PR machine though for moving Bob Dudley into position to replace Englishman Hayward. A true son of the Mississippi with a “deep appreciation and affinity for the Gulf Coast” surely Dudley couldn’t make a bigger mess of America’s ‘big ocean’ than that Tony guy. (What is it with Englishmen called Tony and messing up in the Gulf?)

Let’s hope for all our sakes (and pensions, and savings and investments!) that Mississippi Bob can succeed where Kevin Costner and Tony Hayward failed.

In the meantime watch this classic USB Comedy video.

It would be funny if it wasn’t so true!