Bp has paid £7 Billion in taxes in the UK alone and this wasn't even earnt in this country. They are now shutting Grangemouth refinery and they are now having 55% workforce cutback in the south east refinery before 2005 because of Gordan Brown tax grab. If you look at Bp company figures in the FT it shows forecourt business loses money and that why now you see forecourt selling food etc. Bp only make profit on oil, gas & bitumen and not petrol ( they do make profit on petrol but wafer thin margins). Bp company has to grow bigger worldwide to offset the greedy UK government tax policies.
If it carry on they have no choice but to shut the refinery down and Gordan will have to find an extra £7 billion plus more because of a massive redundancy and the jobless.
To be fair Bp and others are only selling the petrol for approximately 16p per litre and those who attack Bp for making monster profits have got it wrong. A decade ago Bp was losing money, now it leads the world. Lord Browne of Bp took an ailing mulit-national risks & gamble by cutting costs, made huge and high risk plans such as buing Amoco & Atlantic Richfield. I give you one of an example, Richard Branson is often applaud for the success of his company and rightly so, but Richard's virgin Atlantic turned in a £49 million profit last year and Lord browne makes over 249 times as much profit as branson's firm which about £31 million a day as opposed to Virgin's £125,000 a day. So why is it many chose to turn Branson into a saint and browne into a "dirty capitalist?"
Bp also pays another tax of £320 million for permission to search for north sea oil and Shell have cancelled some of their plans because of this new windfall tax. Whatever we think about Lord browne, I reckon he's a credit to the nation specially when this very greedy greedy government has taken so far.
