British Gas owner Centrica has just announced that its yearly profits have tripled to a new record high £3.3 billion – and people are not happy.
The energy giant’s for 2022 are much higher than the £948 million it made in 2021, before Russia invaded Ukraine and put a strain on energy supplies across the whole of Europe.
They even surpassed the company’s last record profits of £2.7 billion in 2012, and managed to reinstate their dividend to shareholders last year after cutting it during the pandemic.
On Thursday, shareholders were told they’d receive a dividend this year worth more than £200 million in total.
Chief executive Chris O’Shea is also expected to receive more than £3 million in salary and bonuses due to Centrica’s financial performance. The bonus alone is worth £1.6 million.
Soaring wholesale gas prices trickled down to consumers, with prices rising so quickly the government had to step in to subsidise bills over the winter.
The cost of living crisis – triggered by the rising energy prices and the subsequent hike in inflation – means the whole country has struggled over the last year.
The whole country aside from the energy giants, it seems.
Centrica’s profits were boosted by its operations in its North Sea oil and gas, and its nuclear power divisions, as were both Shell and BP.
Shell’s profits reached £68.1 billion in 2022 while BP doubled its profits to a record £23 billion.
The government did introduce an oil and windfall tax on operators in the North Sea, and Centrica is also subject to chancellor Jeremy Hunt’s electricity generator levy.
But – there have been widespread calls for a larger tax or levy, as clearly the energy giants are still taking home a very comfortable amount.
According to The Guardian, Sana Yusuf a climate campaigner at Friends of the Earth, said the government “needs to step up and back growing calls for a tougher windfall tax on excessive profits of fossil fuel companies like Centrica”.
Instead, campaigners want energy giants to put greater investment into insulation and homegrown renewables to bring down emissions.
Meanwhile, British Gas has also been criticised after debt agents were found to have forced prepayment metres on vulnerable customers in an effort to recover debt.
In response, the firm suspended the use of court warrants to install prepayment metres and all suppliers have been temporarily banned.
Centrica said that it was “extremely disappointed” in the allegations against “one of our third-party contractors”.
So, as you can imagine, Twitter was not happy.