Erikka Askeland: Bonuses beat ecology among shareholders' grievances

TheY are at it again. Activists for Greenpeace yesterday climbed up and attached themselves to the oil rig rented by Cairn Energy to undertake exploratory drilling off the icy shores of Greenland.

Lucky for the climbers, the rig is in the pleasant climes off the Bosphorus rather than in the inhospitable waters of the Arctic. You could probably understand why they chose to take their stand at the start of the drill rig Leiv Eiriksson's journey rather than the end. Last time, the protesters got themselves in a bit of a bind and had to be rescued by Cairn employees.

Such high jinks may serve to highlight the dangers of offshore drilling but it must be hard to feel moral certitude when the very people you are attempting to persuade end up saving your life.

Oil was a major topic of protest this week, and it wasn't just the adrenaline junkies who like to risk life and limb to promote their cause that were making noise.

In Edinburgh this week, some First Nations people from Canada took to the floor at the Royal Bank of Scotland annual meeting. Jasmine Thomas of the Yinka Dene Alliance waited patiently, standing in the aisle, until chairman Sir Philip Hampton directed a microphone to her.

Initially the audience and the board listened patiently but after about ten minutes there was restlessness in the cheap seats and surly shareholders who were waiting their turn to have a go about bank bonuses started shouting her down. Her mic was turned off and she handed it back but she raised her voice and continued to speak about how the bank, by supporting oil explorers and pipeline builders, is acting against the opposition of 80 Canadian tribes.

The First Nations alliance claims RBS has raised more than 5.6 billion for firms mining the tar sands, including 163 million for Enbridge, which is building a controversial pipeline from Alberta to Kitimat on the British Columbia coast. They fear the effects of oil spills on what is largely pristine wilderness.

Hampton seemed to deny their figures and said RBS's investment in related oil firms was "so small", but undermined his argument somewhat when he said the bank makes sure it respects local and national Canadian law with regard to its investments. Of course, if the alliance thought Canadian law was on their side, they probably wouldn't have had to burn all that oil flying over to Edinburgh.

Date-watchers will have noted that this week was also the grim one-year anniversary of the deadly and disastrous explosion on the Deepwater Horizon. BP marked it by taking out a series of advertisements designed by its agency, Ogilvy, using pictures of sunshine on the beautiful Gulf of Mexico.The sparkling surface of the water, in a picture taken last September, looks spick-and-span but it does not show what has happened to the four million or so barrels of leaked oil beneath the surface that have not been recovered or washed up somewhere, or what it is doing.

Of course, the BP board had an even bigger row from shareholders and protesters at its annual meeting the week before. Thomas and her anti-tar-sands associates were there, too. But it wasn't just the ones wearing traditional native dress or covered in black syrup that were up in arms. At its meeting, BP also faced a serious revolt of shareholders.

Sir William Castell saw more than 43 per cent of voters abstain or vote against his re-appointment. Castell has the misfortune of holding the chairmanship of BP's safety, ethics and environmental assurance committee in a year during which there was not much that was safe, ethical or environmentally assured about the business, its attackers would argue.

The company's remuneration report, which awarded disgraced chief executive Tony Hayward a share package worth around 8 million and head of exploration and production Andy Inglis 6m, got a big thumbs down.

Yet, while a sizeable 26.4 per cent of remuneration report votes were against or abstained, what is surprising is this was not the biggest show of dismay by investors BP has had. Last year, 15.8 per cent of shareholders either voted against or withheld but in 2009, a massive 40 per cent did.

This says much about what really upsets shareholders. In 2009, they were wound up about a 15 per cent discretionary shares bonus on top of a few million paid out in cash to Hayward and Inglis in a year when total shareholder returns declined 34.5 per cent. If only they had known then how really bad things would get.

In a year when pay became less of an issue after one of the worst man-wrought environmental disasters in the history of the world, it seems unlikely shareholders will ever put concerns about oil or the environment ahead of dividend payments. At least, not yet.