Activist shareholders and pension funds will grill BP this week over its safety record and US contractors as the financial fallout from the Gulf of Mexico disaster continues to spread.
The coalition of investors, who have successfully forced companies such as Shell to be more transparent over the environmental impact of their controversial oil sands operations, is planning to launch a similar campaign against deepwater drilling, the Guardian has learned.
Today BP's shares fell by a further 3%. Since the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded and sank nearly a fortnight ago almost $30bn (£19.7bn) has been wiped off its market value on worries about the cost of the clean-up operation, any fines and damage to BP's long-term reputation.
Lauren Compere, the managing director of Boston Common Asset Management, has organised a conference call with the company this Friday with up to 40 other institutional investors holding an estimated $1bn of BP shares. "We will raise questions over the amount of due diligence and oversight BP carries out on its partners and contractors before it enters into contracts with them," she said. "There have been a number of incidents with BP in the US over the last five years. It makes you wonder how well they are overseeing their operations there, although we have seen kernels of improvement in BP's safety approach since [the chief executive] Tony Hayward took over."
Louise Rouse from FairPensions, the lobbygroup which organised the investor campaign against oil sands, said that the fall in BP's share price demonstrated that fund managers had a financial responsibility to scrutinise more closely key decisions by management, such as exploiting oil sands or deepwater drilling in environmentally sensitive areas.
Compere said: "As with oil sands, the technology for deepwater drilling has not caught up with the potential environmental impact. This disaster means socially responsible investors may well end up putting deepwater drilling in the same category as oil sands."
BP today continued its public relations offensive, announcing that it had begun to drill a relief well to siphon off the oil leaking from the crippled 5,000ft pipeline. It said this would take "some three months", as it would have to drill 13,000 feet beneath the seabed through extremely hard rock and under enormous water pressure to reach the well.
A BP spokesman also said that the first of three steel canopies to encase the leaks could be in place by next weekend. About 5,000 barrels of oil a day are leaking from three holes. A BP spokesman said the company did not know when the other two canopies would be ready.
Hayward said that the disaster, in which 11 workers died, "was not BP's accident". BP has repeatedly stressed that the rig was leased and operated by the drilling firm Transocean. Under US law BP is responsible for the clean-up operation, as it holds the drilling licence.
Phil Hall, the former editor of the News of the World and chairman of PHA Media, whose recent clients include former England football captain John Terry, said in damage limitation situations "we advise clients to try to do – and be seen to do – everything which is possible". BP's argument that the disaster was not its accident was "a bit like a hospital saying it's the surgeon's fault, not the hospital's", he said.
