What do people think companies do with their profits? Hide them under the mattress?
If their staff, senior and/or junior get pay rises and bonuses, those are generally well publicised. If senior staff given large sums it's generally because they are thought to be doing a good job and to try to stop them going off and doing a good job elsewhere, maybe at the competition. Perhaps people think that junior staff who work for an energy company should do so for a pittance?
Some of it goes to shareholders. I understand that many MNers think they are nasty, grasping rich people, but mainly they are pension and insurance companies, holding shares for their customers. Shareholding is a method of people getting together to lend money to companies. I wonder how many MNers would be willing to lend their money, with the ever-present risk of losing it all, and not getting any return on it. Just because you don't have savings now, it doesn't mean you won't at some point in the future, and putting them under the mattress results in loss due to inflation. No shareholders would mean companies couldn't really operate as they would only have their day-to-day, varying income to use to do their business, including paying staff. Some shares are owned directly, as a type of savings, maybe instead of a pension, or within ISAs, again, as savings. Dividends on the FTSE 100 have averaged about 3.7% recently, which sounds good against bank interest rates but is dreadful when you consider that anyone who invested/saved in Centrica shares 10 years now has about 27% of what they paid for them. Ie if they saved £100 they now have £27. That's quite a loss for a 3.7% dividend.
Some of the profits go back into the business of the company. Suppliers have to provide and maintain the infrastructure and pay people to do it. They will be quite skilled people so, even if you think they shouldn't earn much to keep your bills down, the employer probably disagrees. For exploration the costs are high. We need to invest now in finding and extracting the gas, oil, and possibly coal that we'll need in 40 years time. As people 40 years ago paid for the exploration for what we are using now, is it reasonable to refuse to pay for the next generation's energy. Energy companies are also investing heavily in 'green' technologies, which aren't very cost efficient at the moment, but are hoped to be in the future. They won't be developed unless money is spent doing so.