BP Fires Chairman Manifold Months Into the Job as Board Cites Conduct Concerns

BP Fires Chairman Manifold Months Into the Job as Board Cites Conduct Concerns The abrupt removal leaves BP without a settled chair as Murray Auchincloss tries to defend his turnaround, with shares already down 4.3% on the news. BP's ousted chairman Albert Manifold clashed with a fellow board director and had a fractious relationship with chief executive Murray Auchincloss in the months before his dismissal, according to media reports published on Monday (2026-06-01). The Wall Street Journal, citing people familiar with the matter, said Manifold had clashed with non-executive director Simon Henry, a former Shell finance chief.⁶ The detail matters because it reframes a sudden boardroom purge as something closer to a breakdown in working relationships at the top of a company already struggling to convince investors it has a strategy. BP removed Manifold with immediate effect on Tuesday (2026-05-26), saying the board acted unanimously over "serious" and "unacceptable" governance and conduct concerns. He had held the chair for less than a year, replacing Helge Lund only last July.^3,6 Investors did not wait for an explanation. BP shares fell 4.3% to 527.4 pence by late afternoon in London on the day of the announcement, a reaction that read less as relief than as fresh uncertainty about who steers the company next.⁵ That uncertainty lands on a management team that was already under scrutiny. Will Hares, senior energy analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence, said the interim leadership and the next permanent chair "must rekindle investor confidence in the company's strategy and internal controls." His framing puts the burden squarely on Auchincloss, himself only confirmed as chief executive relatively recently, to hold the line on a turnaround now missing a chairman to back it.⁴ BP's governance has been contested for some time. At the 2025 annual general meeting, Lund drew a near 25% vote against his re-election amid conflicting shareholder pressure over the company's climate strategy. Lund himself secured just under 76% support last year, a sizeable protest that signalled a board already living on a thin margin of investor patience.^5,3 The backdrop to all this is the earlier exit of former chief executive Bernard Looney, who forfeited around £32.4 million in remuneration after his own departure. For a company that has cycled through senior figures and pay disputes, a second chair leaving under a cloud in two years compounds the impression of instability rather than resolving it.³ The market context for BP is unforgiving. ICE Brent crude front-month sat at $80.38 a barrel as of Sunday's snapshot (2026-06-21), a level that offers neither the windfall that masks corporate drama nor the collapse that forces it into the open. BP is trying to defend a strategy at a price that gives it little cover either way. Britain's upstream base offers no relief. The Economist described the North Sea as a basin in decline, where an effective tax rate of 78% ranks among the highest in the world and deters investment in fields that already carry high production costs. North Sea revenues, which peaked at 3% of GDP in the mid-1980s, are now a fading line in the public accounts rather than a strategic asset.² That fiscal reality shapes how a major like BP weighs UK assets against opportunities elsewhere. While Manifold's departure is a governance story, it plays out against a home basin where the returns on staying invested keep shrinking, leaving management with fewer easy answers about where to deploy capital. The signs of retrenchment are already visible elsewhere in BP's portfolio. The offshore wind sector was rocked by reports in the week of 2026-05-18 that BP and TotalEnergies were looking to divest 11.5 GW of offshore projects on a deteriorating outlook, part of a wider squeeze that the German wind lobby BWO said had left up to 16 GW of capacity in limbo and risked 45 billion euros of investment.¹ For a chairman brought in to steady strategy, that backdrop made the job harder before the conduct dispute ever surfaced. A board cannot easily reassure investors about long-term direction while simultaneously walking away from the low-carbon bets it once championed. What happens next turns on the search for a permanent chair and whether the interim arrangement can steady nerves. The unresolved risk for shareholders is that a governance rupture this public hardens into a leadership vacuum, with Auchincloss defending a strategy that the next chair may want to rewrite. Until BP names a credible successor and spells out what changes, the discount the market applied on Tuesday (2026-05-26) is unlikely to close.