BP has appointed Irishman Albert Manifold as its new chair, paving the way for Helge Lund to depart after six troubled years steering the struggling UK oil major.
Manifold, 62, was chief executive of building materials group CRH, a leading supplier of cement and concrete, for a decade until last December. The company moved its primary listing from London to New York in September 2023.
“He transformed and refocused CRH into a global leader,” said Amanda Blanc, the senior independent director at BP who led the process to find a successor for Lund.
Manifold will join BP as chair-elect on September 1st and take over as chair the following month, accelerating Lund’s timeline for leaving BP. At the start of April, BP said Lund planned to step down “most likely during 2026”.
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CRH’s share price has risen by 74 per cent since it left the London Stock Exchange for the US. The Dublin-headquartered group said at the time of the switch that roughly three-quarters of its earnings came from North America and that the market was a key driver of future growth.
[ Manifold bows out of CRH after almost 400% share price surgeOpens in new window ]
The company, which supplies building materials to projects including the Burj Khalifa tower in Dubai and the expansion of the Paris metro, made $35.6 billion in revenue last year. Manifold is also a non-executive director at chemicals company LyondellBasell, which is in negotiations to sell four of its European plants amid a slide in its shares.
In February, leading investors told the Financial Times that BP might also move its listing to New York in search of a “deeper pool of capital”, after activist investor Elliott Management took a stake in the company. BP’s chief executive Murray Auchincloss said in April that the company had no current plans to move its listing.
Lund, who was previously chief executive of Norway’s Equinor and gas company BG Group, took over as BP chair in 2019 with a mandate to appoint a new chief executive and oversee a new strategy to guide BP through the energy transition.
His efforts on both fronts ran into trouble. Lund’s pick for chief executive, Bernard Looney, was dismissed in 2023 for failing to fully disclose to the board past relationships with BP colleagues.
Earlier this year, BP abandoned Looney’s plan to move away from oil and gas and reinvent itself as a green energy company.
At the company’s annual general meeting in April, a quarter of BP’s investors voted against Lund’s re-election in a largely symbolic protest. - Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2025
