The executive who oversaw BP’s Deepwater Horizon disaster has landed a $6.2m (£5m) payout at his new employer despite the death of a worker on an offshore rig in the Gulf of Mexico.
Andy Inglis ran BP’s exploration and production division before leaving in the wake of the spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, one of the worst ever environmental disasters, in which 11 workers died.
Inglis has run oil and gas firm Kosmos Energy, which is listed in New York and London, since 2014. Shareholders this month approved Inglis’s pay package, which includes a $1.5m bonus and $3.7m in stock awards.
Inglis has been handed the payout despite the death of a contractor on a drillship working for Kosmos in the Gulf of Mexico. An Allrig contractor died on the Seadrill-owned West Neptune ship in January 2021.
Kosmos said the company had conducted an “extensive investigation” after the fatality and held sessions to study what could be done to prevent the recurrence of a similar incident.
Executives at multinational commodities companies can see their pay docked if workers die on the job. This year the FTSE firms Shell and Glencore cut the bonuses of their chief executives after fatalities.
Inglis’s bonus, and those of his colleagues, would have been larger, but the fatality meant health and safety targets were missed. Several operational and financial key performance indicators were also missed, trimming the payout.
However, Lord Sikka, professor of accounting at the University of Sheffield, said Inglis should not have received any bonus. He said: “I think the bonus is wrong and shows how insensitive corporations are to the death of workers. The company’s sustainability report acknowledges the incidence, but provides no information about consequences for his family and what the company has done to mitigate the tragedy for them.
“The report comes across as a PR exercise rather than any reflections on corporate ethics and responsibility.”
Inglis had been tipped to succeed Tony Hayward as chief executive of BP until the tragic oil spill. He was ousted from BP in a boardroom overhaul designed to improve the company’s image in America after the rig blowout.
Lord Browne, the former chief executive of BP who preceded Tony Hayward, last month told the Observer that Deepwater Horizon had presented “an existential threat” to the future of BP.
Inglis joined Kosmos in 2014 as chairman and chief executive from Petrofac, the oil services firm, and he has also sat on the board of the defence company BAE Systems.
Kosmos is a $3.7bn oil and gas explorer headquartered in Dallas, Texas with operations off the coast of the US and west Africa.
In a letter to shareholders commenting on the last year, Inglis said: “We rebuilt operational momentum across the portfolio with a return to drilling in Ghana, Equatorial Guinea and the Gulf of Mexico.
“Kosmos has emerged from the last two years of the pandemic with a stronger business and an important role to play in supporting the energy transition and strengthening energy security.”
Kosmos declined to comment on Inglis’ bonus.
