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(Reuters) – Bernard Looney has resigned as chief executive of BP, a position he held for less than four years, the British oil group said on Tuesday, an announcement that comes after several accusations of Looney’s personal relationships with colleagues.
Financial director Murray Auchincloss will take over in the interim, BP said.
In a statement, BP announced that “Bernard Looney has notified the company of his resignation as Chief Executive Officer with immediate effect.”
“Mr. Looney today informed the company that he now accepts that he has not been completely transparent in previous statements,” the document added. “He did not provide details of all of his relationships and accepts that he was obliged to disclose them more specifically.”
Bernard Looney, 53, arrived as CEO of BP in February 2020 promising to reinvent the century-old group, unveiling an ambitious plan to take the energy giant towards carbon neutrality by 2050.
Under his leadership, BP went through some of the most complicated years in its modern history, between the COVID-19 health crisis and the rapid withdrawal from Russia following the start of the war in Ukraine last year, in a context global inflation.
(Reporting Anirudh Saligrama in Bangalore and Shadia Nasralla in London; Jean Terzian)
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