Move fails to split roles of chairman, CEO

The Rockefeller family thinks the company is too focused on short-term gains.

DALLAS (AP) — Exxon Mobil Corp. chairman and CEO Rex Tillerson will retain both of those jobs at the world’s biggest publicly traded oil company after a highly public, Rockefeller-led push to separate the roles that failed again Wednesday.

Stripping Tillerson of the chairman’s job in favor of an independent director was the main focus of the company’s annual shareholder meeting at a downtown symphony hall. In the end, the measure got support of only 39.5 percent of shareholders, slightly less than last year’s 40 percent, despite a hard push by descendants of John D. Rockefeller, the founder of Exxon Mobil predecessor Standard Oil Corp.

A variety of institutional investors in the U.S. and abroad also lined up behind the proposal.

After the meeting, Tillerson, who’s held both positions since 2006, said continued strong support to change company leadership — despite massive profits in recent quarters — was not lost on him.

“It just re-emphasizes to me the importance of our continuing efforts to communicate better with shareholders and with the public and with policymakers,” Tillerson told reporters at a news conference.

That said, none of the 17 shareholder proposals considered at the three-hour meeting received enough support to pass, and all were opposed by the Exxon Mobil board.

Introduced primarily by environmental-minded investors and shareholder activists, they sought such things as quantitative goals for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, shareholder input on executive compensation, and a report on the likely consequences of climate change for developing countries and poor communities between now and 2030.

This marked the seventh time the proposal to split the roles of chairman and CEO was considered.

During the gathering, Peter O’Neill, a great-great grandson of John D. Rockefeller, said he spoke for a majority of the family when he wished Exxon Mobil continued success. “We’re very, very pleased with the performance that the company has been delivering,” O’Neill said.

But Rockefeller family members and others have said they’re concerned Irving-based Exxon Mobil is too focused on short-term gains from soaring oil prices and should do more to invest in cleaner technology for the future. Some shareholders lambasted the company for not doing enough now to create far-reaching policies to reduce harmful greenhouse-gas emissions.

Exxon Mobil has said Rockefeller family members who have filed or co-filed shareholder resolutions own a total of about 332,000 shares. At the end of last year, Exxon Mobil had 5.3 billion shares outstanding.

Some shareholders complained about the company spending too much on share repurchases, others said they’d like larger dividends.

But everyone seemed to agree it would be hard to top the company’s financial results. Exxon Mobil posted the largest annual profit by a U.S. company — $40.6 billion — in 2007. And, lifted by record crude prices to start 2008, it earned another $10.9 billion in the first three months of the year — the second-biggest U.S. quarterly corporate profit ever.

As he has in the past, Tillerson said Exxon Mobil will continue to spend the bulk of its profits on finding and producing new supplies of crude oil and natural gas. The company predicts global energy demand will grow by 1.3 percent annually, on average, from 2005 to 2030, and it often cites government forecasts that say fossil fuels will continue to provide about 80 percent of global energy supplies in 2030.