Climate campaigners have threatened legal action against BP after the energy giant refused to include a shareholder resolution at its AGM in April.

Dutch sustainable investor group Follow This is had filed a resolution calling on BP to detail its strategies for coping with a fall in demand for oil and gas.

Mark van Baal, Follow This chief executive, told the Financial Times that BP’s decision indicated the battle over sustainability and ESG was moving from the US to Europe.

“BP is trying to silence its own shareholders rather than answering them,” he said and added that the refusal amounted to an “attack on shareholder rights”.

According to the FT, Follow This as requested BP issue a supplementary notice including its resolution. Failure to do so might prompt legal action or a call for an extraordinary general meeting.

Campaigners in the US have been contending with a switch in policy among regulators which means they no longer respond to so-called “no action” requests from companies to exclude shareholder resolutions from AGMs.

The decision, by the US Securities and Exchange Commission, creates considerable uncertainty for shareholders, while at the same time granting more leeway to boards to exclude resolutions without regulatory approval.

The FT speculates that the BP exclusion may be the first of its kind among FTSE 100 companies.

‘We will not object’

In the US, campaign group As You Sow launched a lawsuit against Chubb, an insurance company. At the time, the SEC, rather than green-lighting the exclusion, wrote: “We will not object if the company excludes the proposal from proxy materials.”

Follow This has filed resolutions with BP and Shell. Reuters reports that the resolutions ask the companies to publish reports covering a decade of capital expenditure, production plans and free cashflow projections under “declining demand scenarios”.

The resolutions are backed by more than 20 other investors, who manage around $1.5 trillion and include Achmea Investment Management and the Ethos Foundation.

In February, van Baal issued a statement saying: “Every shareholder deserves to know how BP plans to create value in a structurally declining oil and gas market.”

He adds: “When demand fell temporarily during the Covid pandemic, BP halved its dividend. That experience alone should make this question unavoidable.”

Following the start of the US and Israeli war against Iran, oil and gas prices surged on international markets. However, many commentators argue the price rises have placed greater urgency on moving to renewable energy.