Who Owns BP?

BP has no owner. BP p.l.c. is listed on the London Stock Exchange with no controlling shareholder and no parent company. Its largest holders are index managers — BlackRock and Vanguard — holding on behalf of their funds’ investors, with the activist firm Elliott Management having built a stake above 5% in 2025. Companies House records nothing about its ownership, because listed companies are exempt from the PSC regime. Ownership verified 6 September 2026.

Who owns BP today?

The company is BP P.L.C. (00102498), incorporated 14 April 1909 and registered at 1 St James’s Square, London.

That 1909 date and six-digit number are the register’s record of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company — the business founded to exploit the first commercially significant oil discovery in the Middle East. BP is one of the oldest continuously registered companies covered on this site.

It is owned by its shareholders, who number in the hundreds of thousands and change daily. There is no parent, no family, no state holding and no controlling block.

Ultimate parent and corporate structure

BP p.l.c. is the ultimate parent and nothing sits above it. Beneath it are several thousand subsidiaries — Companies House returns more than 6,700 companies matching “BP”, though most of those are unrelated businesses using the initials.

The group is organised by activity rather than by brand: upstream oil and gas production, refining and trading, retail forecourts, and the lower-carbon businesses it built up from 2020 and has since scaled back.

Its US operations are held through subsidiaries rather than a separate listed company, which is why the 2010 Deepwater Horizon liabilities fell on the British parent and its shareholders — including a large number of UK pension funds.

Major shareholders or controlling persons

No individual or company controls BP. The largest holders are the index managers, with BlackRock reported at around 9% and Vanguard around 5%. As on this site’s other listed profiles, those shares sit inside funds and belong to the funds’ investors — pension savers, mostly — rather than to the managers.

The holding that changed the company’s direction is Elliott Management, which disclosed a stake of just over 5% in April 2025, becoming BP’s third-largest shareholder. Elliott is an activist: it pressed BP to cut renewable energy spending, sell assets and focus on cash generation, and BP’s subsequent retreat from its earlier transition targets followed that pressure.

This is the useful lesson of BP’s register. A 5% holder is nowhere near control and would not qualify as a person with significant control under UK rules, which start at 25%. Yet a determined 5% shareholder demonstrably reshaped a company of BP’s size. Influence and ownership are different things, and the thresholds that trigger disclosure are not the thresholds at which power begins.

Norway’s sovereign wealth fund is also among the larger holders — a state fund holding a stake in an oil company, without controlling it.

Official records and evidence

The company number, the 14 April 1909 incorporation and the previous name BP Amoco p.l.c. are all Companies House records for 00102498 and can be checked directly.

Beyond that, the register is silent. BP has no PSC entry and no statement because a company with voting shares admitted to a regulated market is exempt from the regime. That is a statutory exemption, not a gap or an evasion, and the same is true of Vodafone, Tesco and Rolls-Royce Holdings elsewhere on this site.

BP’s shareholders are disclosed instead through the market: major holdings notifications to the exchange when a holder crosses a threshold, and the annual report. BP is also SEC-registered because of its US listing, adding a further layer of disclosure. Every percentage is a snapshot from a filing date, and index positions drift continuously.

Ownership history and changes

BP’s ownership history is the most politically consequential of any company on this site.

• 1909 — incorporated as the Anglo-Persian Oil Company.
• 1914 — the British government buys a 51% controlling stake, on Winston Churchill’s argument that the Royal Navy needed secure oil. BP was, for most of the twentieth century, a state-controlled company.
• 1951–54 — Iran nationalises the company’s assets; the British and American response included the coup that restored the Shah.
• 1979–1987 — successive governments sell down; the final tranche is disposed of under Margaret Thatcher in 1987, ending state ownership.
• 1998 — merges with Amoco of the United States; the company is renamed BP Amoco p.l.c. before reverting.
• 2013–2022 — holds and then writes off a near-20% stake in Russia’s Rosneft, abandoned after the invasion of Ukraine.

So a company now presented as a straightforward public company was majority-owned by the British state for 73 years. The register’s previous name, BP Amoco p.l.c., is the only part of that history Companies House preserves.

Related companies and brands

BP owns Castrol, the Wild Bean Café chain on its forecourts, bp pulse charging and Aral in Germany. In Britain many BP-branded petrol stations are operated by franchisees or by retail partners rather than by BP directly — the brand on the canopy does not establish who owns the site.

BP is not connected to Shell, ExxonMobil, TotalEnergies or Chevron, all separately owned and listed. Persistent market speculation about a Shell approach to BP has produced no transaction, and BP remains independent.

Its holding in Rosneft is gone, and it retains no Russian interest.