BP finance director Dr Byron Grote has made a profit of more than half a million dollars on options he took up yesterday.
Dr Grote paid $37.76 a share for 25,000 BP ADSs, which were part of the giant oil company's Executive Directors Incentive Plan. These were immediately sold at $59.4957 each. This ADS stake is equal to 150,000 shares.
That equates to a gain of $543,000, which is equivalent to £323,000.
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Dr Grote raised £163,000 from a share sale in February.
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Dr Grote has three decades of experience with BP and its subsidiary Standard Oil of Ohio. He has been BP finance director since 2002. He is also a non-executive director of Unilever and a member of the Cornell University Johnson Graduate School of Management Advisory Council - Dr Grote's PhD in Quantitative Analysis is from Cornell University.
At the beginning of the week BP said test drilling on a western extension of the Kaskida field in the Gulf of Mexico has confirmed oil in lower tertiary reservoirs. BP has a 70% interest in the Kaskida field and is also the operator.
BP reported better than expected third quarter profits in October. Profit attributable to shareholders came to $5.34bn in the third quarter of 2009 against $8.05bn in the third quarter last year. Replacement cost profit fell to $4.98m compared with $10.03m twelve months ago.
Despite recovering throughout the year, oil prices are still not at the inflated levels seen last year, while gas prices have remained weak. However, analysts expected income to tumble even more, to just over $3bn.
BP expects to cut more costs this year than it had initially planned, raising the full year cost savings target to $4bn from $3bn.
BP has announced that its Bruce and Rhum gas fields are about to return to production after several months of annual maintenance. This comes at a time when gas prices are starting to rise as the weather gets colder.
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