BP shareholders advised to vote against chair over climate resolution exclusion
BP shareholders should vote against its new chair over his decision to exclude a climate resolution from the company’s next annual meeting, a major proxy adviser has recommended,Glass Lewis has advised investors to vote against Albert Manifold, who has been in his post for just six months,The institution, which advises some of the world’s biggest investors, said its recommendation was based on BP’s decision to exclude a proposal to share its longer-term strategy under scenarios of declining oil and gas demand,The resolution was tabled by the climate activist shareholder group Follow This and would have prompted the company and its shareholders to discuss the issue at BP’s annual general meeting on 23 April,BP, one of the biggest oil companies in the world, is in the process of pivoting its focus back to oil and gas after an ill-received foray into renewables.
Manifold, who previously ran the building material company CRH, joined in October with a promise to help BP “reach its full potential”.This month Meg O’Neill, a former executive at the US oil company ExxonMobil, became the chief executive – BP’s fourth boss since 2023 and the first woman to fill the role.Glass Lewis said the board’s decision to exclude the resolution from its AGM “further raises questions about transparency, shareholder communication and responsiveness to shareholder concerns”, in a note to investors first reported by Reuters.Manifold said on BP’s website that the board had concluded that the proposal by Follow This was not valid and would be ineffective if it were to pass at the AGM.A spokesperson said BP was focused on building a simpler company following investor engagement.
They said: “That’s why we are making these recommendations, to provide transparent, standardised disclosures that support clear comparisons across companies,”Another advisory firm, ISS, has recommended investors vote against the BP board’s request to retire two proposals on how it reported its climate impact,BP argued that the proposals, made in 2015 and 2019, were no longer relevant because of a more standardised reporting framework,Glass Lewis has also recommended shareholders vote against BP’s request to scrap the climate reporting resolutions, Reuters reported,Last week, Follow This said a group of 12 institutional investors had announced they would vote against BP’s proposal to scrap its existing climate disclosures.
“The concerns among shareholders are larger now than they were in 2025,” said Mark van Baal, the CEO of Follow This, who argued it was “conceivable” that more than 25% of shareholders could vote against the resolution, which would be enough to block it.O’Neill told BP staff last week that the company was operating in a world of “significant complexity”, as she became its third chief executive in under five years.In a staff memo, O’Neill said: “Right now, we’re operating in an environment of significant complexity: geopolitical tension; conflict; rapid technological change; and shifting global energy demand.I believe that we, as a company, have a clear job to do: delivering energy to the world, today and tomorrow – safely, reliably and efficiently.”
Universal Music, home to Taylor Swift and Drake, receives €55bn takeover offer
Billionaire Bill Ackman’s hedge fund has offered to buy Universal Music Group (UMG) in a deal that values the world’s biggest music company at about €55bn (£48bn).Pershing Square, the New-York based hedge fund, has made a bid for the business, which is home to artists including Taylor Swift and Elton John, with a cash and stock deal that would move its stock market listing from Amsterdam to New York.Ackman said in a statement that while the company, which is led by the British-born Sir Lucian Grainge, had done “an excellent job nurturing and continuing to build a world-class artist roster and generating strong business performance”, its share price had lagged owing to issues “unrelated to the performance of its music business”.Shares in UMG, which have been listed in Amsterdam since 2021, had lost more than a quarter of their value in the past year alone. Pershing’s offer triggered a sharp rise, with the price up by 13% on the previous trading day when the Amsterdam Euronext exchange closed on Tuesday
Oil back above $110 in volatile markets as Trump deadline looms for Iran to reopen strait – as it happened
Brent crude has risen above $110 a barrel again, after Donald Trump warned Iran “a whole civilization will die tonight” if Iran does not make an agreement.Brent, the global oil benchmark, has see-sawed in volatile markets today, and is now up 0.8% at $110.67 a barrel.Writing on Truth Social, the US president said:double quotation markA whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again
An AI company with an arsenal of spacecraft: what exactly is SpaceX?
Hello, and welcome to TechScape. I’m your host, Blake Montgomery, US tech editor at the Guardian, writing to you as I listen to George Handel’s Messiah for Easter.SpaceX filed confidentially for an initial public offering on the US stock market last week at a reportedly astronomical valuation. My colleague Nick Robins-Early reports:Elon Musk’s company, which has become a dominant power in both space travel and satellite communications, could seek a valuation upwards of $1.75tn
Porn, dog poo and social media snaps: the ‘taskers’ scraping the internet for Meta-owned AI firm
Tens of thousands of people have been paid by a company part-owned by Meta to train AI by combing Instagram accounts, harvesting copyrighted work and transcribing pornographic soundtracks, the Guardian can reveal.Scale AI, 49%-controlled by Mark Zuckerberg’s social media empire, has recruited experts across fields such as medicine, physics and economics – putatively to refine top-level artificial intelligence systems through a platform called Outlier. “Become the expert that AI learns from,” it says on its site, advertising flexible work for people with strong credentials.However, workers for the platform said they have become involved in scraping an array of other people’s personal data – in what they described as a morally uncomfortable exercise that diverged significantly from refining high-level systems.Outlier is managed by Scale AI, which has contracts with the Pentagon and US defense companies
Sale believe Courtney Lawes can regain England place after veteran signs one-year deal
Courtney Lawes has been backed to regain his England place following confirmation he will be joining Sale Sharks this summer on a one-year deal. The former national captain has spent the last two seasons with Brive in France’s Pro D2 but has indicated he would love to play international rugby again should the chance arise.While Lawes will be 38 next February and retired from the Test arena after the 2023 World Cup in France, he still feels he can make an impact at the top level of the game. That view is shared by Sale’s director of rugby, Alex Sanderson, who is looking forward to welcoming the former Northampton stalwart to Manchester.“I don’t think we’d have signed him if he was just a player who wanted a paycheck,” said Sanderson
Drone racing to drone strikes: have war and sport become indistinguishable?
The Trump administration’s pushing of the war in Iran reflects a sporting culture driven by clipped-up content, shameless tribalism and a lust for escalation Among the more surprising continuities of 2026 has been the visual kinship between the Winter Olympics and the US’s illegal and unprovoked war in Iran. High-speed camera drones were a highlight of TV coverage of the recent Games in Milano Cortina, bringing viewers within kissing distance of the action as Olympic athletes hurtled down the slopes and around the tracks in the skiing and sliding events. The incessant screech of the drones aside, the introduction of quadcopter-borne cameras felt like a real step forward in coverage of the winter sports, bringing a (literal) new perspective to events that had become, over recent decades, fairly static as a viewing experience.No sooner had the Olympics finished than aerial video was back on our screens – only the footage, in this case, was of a far darker variety. In place of the ludicrous hip flexibility of the slaloming skiers and the high-speed cornering of the monobobbers, for the past month our feeds have been flooded with satellite and drone imagery of the US military blowing Iranian aircraft, ships, vehicles, munitions buildings, and citizens to smithereens
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