People at London's stock index said they will drop BP Plc from their listing of top ethical businesses, as the petroleum company announced it will delay the next earnings report amid challenges in accounting for Gulf oil spill costs.
FTSE said Friday it is evicting BP from the FTSE4Good ethical investment index, effective Sept. 18. Many managers of ethical funds use the index to screen companies before including them in their portfolios.
In a statement, FTSE said its decision "followed consideration of the company's response to the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, the environmental and social impact and its history of similar incidents."
BP was evicted earlier this year from the DJ Sustainability Index. Ethical investors account for an increasing portion of share buyers and, consequently, the decisions could hit demand for BP shares in future.
FTSE's director of responsible investment, David Harris, said: "BP did not have an exemplary record and its response to the incident was not exemplary either."
Earlier Friday, BP said it would delay the release of its third-quarter results by a week because of added accounting complexities related to the oil spill.
The company said its quarterly figures, normally reported on the last Tuesday of the month after the end of a calendar quarter, would now be released on Nov. 2, rather than Oct. 26.
A spokesman said the decision came after it proved challenging to complete its previous quarterly numbers within the normal timeline and denied it was related to the discovery of any new liabilities.
BP released on Wednesday an internal investigation into the explosion on the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig on April 20. The spokesman said the team compiling the report, which laid most of the blame on the companies BP hired to drill the well, had been supported by internal and external lawyers.
But he said the lawyers had been "ring-fenced" from the rest of BP and denied their role was to frame the report -- much criticized by the contractors and U.S. politicians -- so as to help BP fend off lawsuits.
"Their role was to make sure everything in the report was legally watertight," spokesman Andrew Gowers said.
