BP is a hard company to feel sympathy for. Whatever you think about the rights and wrongs of oil production, anyone making $26bn a year is probably big enough and ugly enough to look after themselves.
It's all the more sobering therefore to see this corporate giant knocked off course yet again by the even bigger beasts in the Kremlin. Its shares are battered today by the surprise loss of $700m from its Russian joint-venture, TNK-BP.
The reason why this matters to the rest of us is that BP is one of the few large companies propping up our creaking pensions system. Since the near-collapse of British banking, BP, Shell and a handful of drug companies account for a greatly increased proportion of the dividends paid out by FTSE 100 companies. Thanks to the previously soaring oil price, BP has increased dividends by 30% to $13.3bn (including share buy-backs). Few other companies in the world can match it for putting money into the retirement plans of millions of British people.
Plunging oil prices will make that much harder to sustain in future, but chief executive Tony Hayward today pledged to do whatever he can to keep this cash pipeline flowing - even if that means taking on more borrowing. Unfashionable as it is to say so, without BP's dividends, our pension funds would be in an even worse state than they already are.
