In a bid to add muscle to claims of being a ‘green force’, many vanloads of London’s Metropolitan Police will be present at BP’s Annual General Meeting from 10.15am on April 14th. They will be joining forces with little-known group the Greenwash Guerrillas to ensure that the public are kept out of the newly-renamed Oil Festival Hal1(1) during BP’s Annual General Meeting.

“There is a clear and present danger of highly toxic levels of greenwash at this meeting,” said the Met’s Head of Green Policing Bob Trotter. “For that reason, we will not be allowing members of the general public to enter the Oil Festival Hall for the day. We are also extremely concerned that any BP shareholders entering the building will be at great risk of greenwash contamination, but we will be unable to prevent them from doing so.”

He went on to say that “Rumours that we are doing this to shake off our ‘Metropolitan Petroleum’, ‘friend of Big Oil’ image are entirely unfounded.”

DeAnne Massey of the Greenwash Guerrillas said “This is an unusual partnership for us, but we realised that while we possess state-of-the-art greenwash detection and decontamination equipment, we couldn’t cope alone with the tide of greenwash forecast for the BP AGM. While we look forward to having a warm working relationship with the Met on April 14th, we reserve the right to be openly critical of them whenever we see fit.”

BP executives are thought to be working late into the night on plans to put a positive spin on the death of 15 workers at its Texas City refinery in March, on the massive climatic impact of its Baku-Ceyhan oil pipeline, (described as an ‘environmental timebomb’ by the Independent, 26.6.04), and the vast profits for 2004-5 that led to boss Lord “As always, the best is yet to come”(2) Browne’s £5.6m salary.

More info: 07708 794665
 london@risingtide.org.uk
c/o 62 Fieldgate Street, London E1 1ES.
www.londonrisingtide.org.uk
See also
www.artnotoil.org.uk
www.nationalpetroleumgallery.org.uk

Notes:
1. The Oil Festival Hall was until recently known as the ‘Royal Festival Hall’; notices announcing the renaming have been distributed throughout the Hall during recent weeks.

2. 'As always, the best is yet to come': Lord Browne signed off his letter in BP’s Annual Review 2004 with these remuneratively accurate words.