Exxon Chief Rejects Angry Stockholders’ Call to Quit

Exxon Corp. Chairman Lawrence Rawl, faced at the oil giant’s annual meeting today with angry shareholders and protesters calling Exxon a corporate criminal, rejected demands that he resign over his handling of the Alaskan oil spill.

Rawl told stockholders that, in the wake of the tanker grounding that caused North America’s worst oil spill, Exxon has ordered random drug and alcohol tests for employees in sensitive jobs, “including me.” He also pledged the company will complete its cleanup of Alaska’s Prince William Sound by September or earlier.

“The answer is no, I won’t (resign),” Rawl told 2,000 shareholders in a packed hotel room for an annual meeting dominated by the oil spill issue. “It’s anti-productive to even consider that.”

Protesters chanting “Make Exxon pay” confronted shareholders outside the hotel where the meeting was held. Some wore pig costumes and some stood on stilts so that stockholders could read signs with slogans such as “Exxon is organized crime” and “Exxon is human error.”

Along a long driveway leading to the hotel, demonstrators planted mock tombstones bearing the names of Alaska bays and inlets fouled by the nearly 11 million gallons of crude oil spilled into Prince William Sound by the tanker Exxon Valdez on March 24.

Environmentalists and Alaska residents who own stock in Exxon pressed corporate management to speed cleanup efforts. Ed Rothschild, a spokesman for a coalition of five consumer and environmental groups, stepped to the microphone to call for Rawl’s resignation.

Rawl responded that his stepping down would be the “worst thing we could do now,” and only divert the corporation’s attention from the cleanup effort in Alaska.

“What do you want me to say that is going to make you happy? To say I am going to make it disappear out there? Because I can’t,” Rawl said.