After pouring billions of dollars down the drain on buybacks in pursuit of self-enrichment, the ELT are not done yet! They announced on 30 Sep that shareholders will get a nice shot in the arm of another $1 billion in buybacks (that is, if they actually did anything)
This is lunacy.
The ELT will justify it by saying - "Well the share price can't get any worse can it, haha". Yes it can Ryan. I'm not sure if you have seen the economic sh*tshow we are in globally, that might not yield a recovery anytime soon.
What's more is that this money simply cannot be coming from cash from operations. COP loses money almost every quarter where oil price average $50/bbl. This is coming from somewhere else - either money landed in from a disposal or worse, borrowed cash.
The whole point of disposals was to take that money from somewhere else globally and re-invest it in North America where the ELT claimed they could get higher returns. Not to piss it down the drain on share buybacks as they have been doing - which have been an enormous waste of money to date that qualifies the ELT as grossly incompetent. The only thing these buybacks have achieved is increasing the pay of the ELT.
This is an absolute shambles. It only re-affirms my opinion that the ELT have no long-term vision for COP but hope to sell it in the near future. The massive slidepack presentation with unattainable Permian growth last year was a sales pitch, not a strategy update. Al Walker was brought in to teach these guys the ways of selling a company and making a packet individually.
I have nothing but disgust for these guys. Shame on them.