Who owns the North Pole - part 25

BP has signed a joint venture with Russian energy firm Rosneft to exploit potentially huge deposits of oil and gas in Russia's Arctic shelf.

As part of the deal Rosneft will take 5% of BP's shares in exchange for approximately 9.5% of Rosneft's shares. It is BP's first deal since the Deepwater Horizon spill last year, which cost it billions. The BP shares stake is worth just under $8bn (£5bn). Rosneft is 75% owned by the Russian government. So it will look to many as though the Russian government is taking a 5% stake in a company with strategically important oil reserves all over the world, including - of course - the US.

The firms will explore in three areas - known as EPNZ 1,2,3 - on the Russian Arctic continental shelf. The areas covers 125,000 square kilometres in an area of the South Kara Sea.BP gets access to resources, Rosneft gets access to expertise and knowledge. BP and Rosneft have agreed to set-up an Arctic technology centre in Russia which will work with Russian and international research institutes to develop technologies for the extraction of hydrocarbon resources from the Arctic shelf.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-12195576

BP Bonus

Been a while since Socialist Courier directed atention to the rumuneration that the capitalist class receives .

BP chief executive makes do with bonus of £1.26 million .

The Herald has revealed that Hayward, who became chief executive in May 2007, was awarded a bonus of £1.26m for 2007 which does not include his base salary of £877,000 . Lord Browne of Madingley, the former chief executive of BP, earned more than £3 million before he resigned last year.

A reward for success ? The company last month reported that 2007 net profit fell 5.5% to $20.8bn, despite a 6.2% rise in revenue to $291.4bn and lay-offs of 5000 workers . In contrast, two of BP's main competitors reported a surge in earnings. Royal Dutch Shell, Europe's largest oil company, reported a 23% rise in full-year earnings to a record $31.3bn, while Exxon Mobil posted the largest annual profit yet by a US company with net earnings of $40.6bn.

BP's top five directors, including Hayward, missed out on share awards worth a potential £10.7m because of the company's poor performance. The five were granted no shares at all from a possible 2.2 million under the group's 2005-2007 share incentive scheme - even so i am sure a bonus of a million and a quarter pounds for failure would not go amiss to readers of this blog.

Jake Molloy, general secretary of the Offshore Industry Liaison Committee, the union for offshore rig workers, said: “To make these redundancies and cutbacks and to award themselves payments of this nature is hypocrisy beyond belief. It's sickening.”