Tony Hayward – comeback of a BP oil spill pariah
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Version 0 of 1. In 2010, the former BP boss Tony Hayward was the most hated man in America, pilloried over the Gulf of Mexico disaster, the biggest marine oil spill in history. Four years on, the 56-year-old has become chairman of another FTSE 100 company, the commodities trading and mining group Glencore Xstrata. Hayward, a grammar school boy from Slough, was heavily criticised for his handling of the oil spill following an explosion on the Deepwater Horizon rig on 20 April 2010 and was forced out in July of that year (with a £1m payoff and a £10m pension pot). The blast killed 11 people on the rig and it took months to stem the oil flow. BP was barred from winning new contracts in the Gulf of Mexico and the spill caused a record loss, one of the largest in British corporate history. The disaster has cost the oil firm more than $40bn (£24bn), and the bill is still rising. Hayward became known for a series of gaffes, such as his claim that the spill was "relatively tiny" compared with the "very big ocean". His quip "I'd like my life back" and the fact that he took a day off to go sailing in the Solent during the height of the furore did not go down well in America. Soon after leaving BP, Hayward plotted his comeback through the launch of a new oil investment firm, Vallares, which listed on the London stock market with a value of £1bn in June 2011. He teamed up with the financier Nat Rothschild, and through Vallares they bought Genel Energy, a Turkey-based exploration and production company focused on Kurdistan. Hayward triggered more critical headlines by choosing as his partner Mehmet Sepil, a Turkish businessman who had been fined in 2010 for insider dealing. Hayward described him as a "man of incredible integrity" in a Guardian interview. Hayward joined Glencore's board in April 2011 as a non-executive director before its stock market flotation, and replaced its chairman Sir John Bond on an interim basis a year ago. Friends argued that his vilification in America was exaggerated by the media and that his reputation outside the US and in the business world survived largely intact. Hayward, who holds a PhD in geology from the University of Edinburgh, worked at BP for 28 years, having started as a rig geologist in Aberdeen before stints in France, China and South America. Having previously worked as Lord Browne's assistant, Hayward took over from him as chief executive in 2007 at a time when BP's image was tarnished by another disaster, the Texas City fire, a high court scandal and a spate of other problems, which came after a period of deal-making and financial success. An explosion at BP's Texas City refinery in 2005 killed 15 workers and injured many others, the most damaging incident in the oil firm's history apart from the Deepwater Horizon spill. |