History
The company was founded in Glasgow, Scotland in 1886 by David Sime Cargill to develop oil fields in the Indian subcontinent. In the late 1890s, it passed into the ownership of Sir Campbell Kirkman Finlay, whose family already possessed vast colonial interests through their trading vehicle James Finlay and Co.
It became an early and major shareholder in Anglo-Persian Oil Company (APOC) - later Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, then British Petroleum and eventually BP. It restricted its downstream interests to the subcontinent, where BP had no business. It played a major role in the oil industry in South Asia for about a century through its subsidiaries, and in discovery of oil in the Middle East through its significant interest in British Petroleum. It marketed itself under the BOC brand in Burma, Pakistan and Assam (in India) and through a joint venture Burmah-Shell with Shell in the rest of India.
Burmah Oil Company created mechanised drilling in Magwe Division's oil fields (Yenangyaung, Chauk, and Minbu). Until 1901, when Standard Oil Company began operating in Burma, Burmah Oil Company was the sole oil company to operate in the colony. In 1923, the company secretly gave £5,000 (£236,000 in 2011 money) to future Prime Minister Winston Churchill to lobby the British government to allow them to monopolise Persian oil resources. The company operated in Burma until 1963, when Ne Win nationalised all industries in the country. Based on nationalized assets of Burmah Oil, the Myanma Oil and Gas Enterprise was created.
The company was involved in a landmark legal case, Burmah Oil Co. v Lord Advocate, concerning the destruction of oil fields in Burma by British forces.
In 1966, Castrol was acquired by Burmah, which was renamed Burmah-Castrol.
The Bank of England came to the rescue of Burmah Oil after the company made large losses on its tanker fleets in 1974. The core of the rescue operation was the provision of a year's grace so that the company could become smaller and more viable.
In 2000, Burmah-Castrol was acquired by the then BP Amoco (now renamed BP).
Read more about this topic: Burmah Oil
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