The CEO of BP (I’m old enough to call it British Petroleum) is Bob Dudley. Bob Dudley worked his way into the CEO position by first getting the (relative) dirty work of being assigned the executive in charge for Deepwater Horizon Spill back in 2010. Before that, in 2009, Dudley was the managing director of BP—responsible for oversight in Asia and the Americas. Guess he didn’t drop the ball on that. In the last few years, BP has had to pay out fines and lawyers and they have, like many in the oil game, lost billions due to falling crude oil prices. But, when you are a CEO, it doesn’t really matter, frankly you can go on Charlie Rose and smack him in the face on television and this probably won’t affect your salary.
The London-based energy giant, which operates the BP Whiting Refinery on Lake Michigan, announced another 7,000 layoffs worldwide so far this year in response to a huge drop in the price of crude oil. Dudley is in line to be paid 280 times as much as workers at the Whiting refinery, who earn around $70,000 a year on average, according to the United Steelworkers union.
BP shareholders will vote on whether to approve the compensation plan at BP's Annual General Meeting on Thursday at the ExCeL International Convention Center, in London.
Shareholders will be voting on whether or not Dudley gets his 20 percent raise, which would bring his salary up to $19.6 million. But guess what? The bar was so low, as long as Dudley sold a barrel of crude to someone it seems that he would get his raise, regardless the yearly outcome.
Dudley's compensation package had been $16.3 million in 2014, and is due to increase by about $3.3 million for 2015 because the company's financial performance exceeded expectations. Even so, BP shares dropped 24 percent in value last year. The company recorded its single-largest annual loss in history, due largely to the fall in crude oil prices.
This is the cream of the crop.