Times of London: BP plans to defer dividend after pressure from Obama
I’m not sure that, financially, there is any reason for BP to suspend its dividend and this is more of PR stunt than anything else. The people being hurt by this will be the many fixed income folks in England who rely on this dividend to pay their bills. If suspending the dividend meant saving the company to guarantee the clean-up costs, I’d feel differently, however, but I don’t see that as the case.
President Obama has kicked some ass, alright. Except we’ll soon seen in the British press that his boot landed squarely on the bottoms of little old ladies from Lincolnshire.