LONDON (AP) — British oil giant BP said Wednesday that its interim chief executive, Murray Auchincloss, will take the post permanently to replace Bernard Looney, who resigned after it emerged that he had failed to disclose to the board past relationships with company colleagues .

Auchincloss, a 53-year-old Canadian who was BP’s chief financial officer for more than three years, took the top job in September after Looney’s surprise resignation. Auchincloss joined BP when it acquired oil company Amoco in 1998.

“Since September, the BP board has conducted a thorough and highly competitive process to identify BP’s next CEO, reviewing in detail a number of high-profile candidates,” said BP Chairman Helge Lund.

Lund said the board was in “complete agreement” that Auchincloss was the “excellent candidate and the right leader for BP.”

Auchincloss said he was honored to lead BP and that the company’s strategy to diversify from oil into an “integrated energy company” was not changing.

Biraj Borkhataria, an analyst at RBC Capital Markets, called the appointment the best possible outcome for shareholders, saying hiring someone from outside the company would have brought “further uncertainty about the direction of the business and potentially more excitement around a further change in strategy.”

However, Charlie Kronick, senior climate adviser at environmental group Greenpeace UK, criticized the move as “business as usual for a company that is still not moving away from fossil fuels at the pace required.”

Kronick said a change at the top is “an opportunity for a different approach that redirects significant spending toward the cheap, clean renewables we need to power us for the rest of the century.”

Looney, who had spent his working life with the company, starting as a drilling engineer in 1991, resigned after admitting that he had not been “fully transparent” to the board in disclosing details of all relationships.

He was denied salaries, pensions, bonuses and shares worth 32.4 million pounds ($41 million) after BP claimed he committed “serious misconduct” by misleading the board.

BP does not prohibit relationships between employees, but its code of conduct says employees must consider conflicts of interest, such as having a “close relationship with someone over whose pay, promotion or management one can influence.”

BP has had four different bosses in the last 15 years. Before Looney’s appointment in 2020, Bob Dudley served as chief executive for nearly a decade, stepping in to turn around the company after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.