Former RBS head McKillop to step down from BP board

Sir Tom McKillop has quit his £95,000 job working a handful of days a year as a non-executive director at BP.

The oil giant said today McKillop, the former chairman of Royal Bank of Scotland, would not be standing for re-election at BP's annual meeting this month.

McKillop, who has been at the centre of the country's banking crisis, had previously signalled he was up for re-election.

however, his decision now to retire from the board comes after the 65-year-old's decision to carry on had attracted howls of derision from commentators.

His departure is yet another problem for the board of BP, which has signally failed to find a replacement over the past two years for its 62-year-old chairman Peter Sutherland, who has signalled his willingness to quit.

Rio Tinto chairman Paul Skinner, a former Shell executive, had been lined up as Sutherland's successor only for his candidature to be withdrawn after a storm over a controversial sale of Rio shares and assets to the Chinese.

During McKillop's four-year tenure he sat on the safety, ethics and environment assurance committees, where he has had to deal with the fallout of the fatal explosion at the Texas City refinery and the spillages of more than 200,000 gallons of crude on to the arctic tundra in Alaska. The latter scandal came to haunt BP today after it emerged the US department of justice is suing it over the 2006 spillages.

The justice department is alleging the oil spill on the Alaskan North Slope was illegal as BP Alaska had failed to implement spill prevention and control plans in accordance with industry best practice. It is further alleged BP Alaska failed to properly maintain, test, inspect and repair its pipelines in Prudhoe Bay.

The charges follow a damning Congressional report into the incidents from the House of Representatives' energy committee which accused BP of negligence through cost-cutting.