Ex-BP executive lands $6.2m payout at US firm despite death of offshore worker

theguardian.com:

The executive who oversaw BP’s Deepwater Horizon disaster has landed a $6.2m (£5m) payout at his new employer despite the death of a worker on an offshore rig in the Gulf of Mexico.

Andy Inglis ran BP’s exploration and production division before leaving in the wake of the spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, which killed 11 workers in one of the worst ever environmental disasters.

Inglis has run oil and gas firm Kosmos Energy, which is listed in New York and London, since 2014. Shareholders this month approved Inglis’s pay package, which includes a $1.5m bonus and $3.7m in stock awards.

Inglis has been handed the payout despite the death of a contractor on a drillship working for Kosmos in the Gulf of Mexico. An Allrig contractor died on the Seadrill-owned West Neptune ship in January 2021.

Kosmos said the company had conducted an “extensive investigation” after the fatality and held sessions to study what could be done to prevent a similar incident occurring again.

Executives at multinational commodities companies can see their pay docked if workers die on the job. This year the FTSE firms Shell and Glencore cut the bonuses of their chief executives after fatalities.

Inglis’s bonus, and those of his colleagues, would have been larger but the fatality meant health and safety targets were missed. Several operational and financial key performance indicators were also missed, trimming the payout.

However, Lord Sikka, the professor of accounting at the University of Sheffield, said Inglis should not have received any bonus.

He said: “I think the bonus is wrong and shows how insensitive corporations are to the death of workers. The company’s sustainability report acknowledges the incidence but provides no information about