BP chief executive Tony Hayward said in an interview published today his firm was considering cutting its dividend amid growing US public anger at its handling of a devastating oil spill.
The BP board of directors may consider cutting or deferring its second-quarter dividend – due to be announced on July 27 – or even issuing dividend payments as scrip, effectively a means of delaying payment to shareholders, The Wall Street Journal reported.
“We are considering all options on the dividend. But no decision has been made,” Hayward told the Journal.
President Barack Obama and US politicians have turned their sights in recent days on the regular BP dividend, a lucrative source of income for many US and British pension funds, even as the firm’s shares continued to slump, its value halved and it faced a multi-billion-dollar bill for cleanup operations.
“The administration keeps pushing the boundaries on what we are responsible for,” a BP executive told the newspaper after Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said he would demand that the company also pay for the lost wages of oil workers who were rendered idle by the massive slick.
“This demand is chilling.”
Reports that the US Justice Department is weighing action to make sure BP can pay any spill-related claims while looking into the firm’s dividend payments plans sent further shudders through company executives.
In a interview with NBC television this week, Obama suggested he would have fired Hayward by now if the executive were his employee.
BP’s shareholder dividend accounts for around one pound in every seven pounds of annual shareholder payouts in Britain.
