For many minutes today, activists disrupted the commencement of the OMV Annual General Meeting, while other shareholders booed and screamed "out." They condemned OMV for making a profit of EUR 5.2 billion the previous year, despite the fact that many people could no longer afford heating, and called for a withdrawal from oil and gas.
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| Rainer Seele, the former CEO of Austrian natural gas company OMV |
Mark Garrett, Chairman of the Supervisory Board, mentioned the right to speak that every shareholder has. The young kids were kicked out of the hall after the second interruption.
Today, OMV shareholders will also vote on whether to fire ex-CEO Rainer Seele. The votes of the two major shareholders, the state holding BAG and the Abu Dhabi state oil corporation ADNOC, are sufficient.
Seele had received no votes of confidence in the preceding year. The Supervisory Board recommended discharge following a special audit that found no "actionable misconduct."
Seele is accused, among other things, of routinely breaking the Group's compliance regulations and of tying OMV too closely to Russia. Seele's strategic actions were backed by OMV CEO Alfred Stern. "I'm not a fan of judging Rainer Seele now for doing this," he says. Because those were sound business judgments at the time."
Seele did not make these choices on her own. "In retrospect, one has to say: We massively underestimated the geopolitical risk there," Stern remarked in an interview with the APA before of the general meeting.
The soul issue, according to Florian Beckermann of the Investors' Interest Group (IVA), is far from ended. "Ladies and gentlemen, if the actions are now exonerated, that means: With this syndicate, you can get away with compliance violations," Beckermann remarked during his address. It's detrimental for the syndicate partners, the state-owned BAG and ADNOC.