Daily Mail, By BECKY BARROW and DANIEL BATES, 25th July 2010
The embattled head of BP was on the brink of baling out last night – with a golden parachute to break his fall.
Tony Hayward will receive a seven-figure payoff and a pension estimated at £450,000 a year.
He will stand down by tomorrow morning after three months of abuse left him described as the ‘most hated and clueless man in America’.
Exit: Tony Hayward is set to leave BP after his handling of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill disaster was castigated
The enforced departure of the 53-year-old Briton will top the agenda at a crucial London board meeting today.
He has been widely seen as a ‘dead man walking’ ever since an oil-rig explosion led to the worst-ever environmental disaster in the U.S.
The focus will not be on if he goes but when, and how much it costs. During his 28 years at BP, he has built up a gold-plated £10.8million pension pot which he can start taking at 60.
He is also entitled to a year’s salary, equal to just over £1million. His departure follows a disastrous series of PR gaffes since 11 died in an explosion on April 20 in the Gulf of Mexico.
One of his most notorious was to admit: ‘I want my life back’, at a time when millions of barrels of oil were gushing into the ocean, wrecking the livelihoods of thousands of Americans.
A few weeks later, his decision to go sailing on his yacht in the Isle of Wight added to suspicions that Mr Hayward was not being suitably contrite. But the level of the fury from America has been extraordinary and relentless despite the fact that BP was not solely responsible for the disaster.
President Obama warned: ‘He wouldn’t be working for me after any of those statements.’
Yesterday a BP spokesman insisted that Mr Hayward, whose family have been the victims of crank phone calls, hate mail and death threats, remains the company’s chief executive.
But his departure is inevitable, and will be the second headline-grabbing exit of a BP chief executive in just three years. In 2007, his predecessor Lord Browne dramatically resigned after admitting lying on oath to a High Court judge.
He had desperately tried to prevent the publication of a story about his homosexuality, which he had never publicly revealed, and his former gay lover. Sources say Mr Hayward is unlikely to leave immediately, as BP typically has an orderly handover between two bosses.
His replacement is tipped to be Bob Dudley, an American who replaced him in overseeing the daytoday operations in the Gulf.
The chairman, Carl-Henric Svanberg, whose insistence that BP cares about the ‘small people’ was seen as patronising and insensitive, is expected to stay.
BP will tomorrow publish its quarterly results, which could reveal the largest quarterly loss in British corporate history. They will reveal the financial impact of the oil spill, with provisions of up to £20billion for capping the well, the clean-up and the cost of damage claims.
Its latest update, published on July 19, revealed that it has mobilised 43,100 people, more than 6,470 vessels and dozens of aircraft. It has already paid out around £135million to 67,500 claimants, and says the cost of the response has totalled £2.6billion – so far.
Ongoing clean-up bid: Workboats operate at the Deepwater Horizon site
The company says it will finish placing the last piece of pipe into a relief well intended to help kill the oil leak ‘some time in the next week’. News of Mr Hayward’s hefty payoff caused outrage yesterday among fishermen in the Gulf of Mexico, many of whom have failed to see any of the compensation promised by BP.
Captain Greg Henry, whose charter boat business off the coast of New Orleans has been shut down and now relies on handouts from charities to survive, said: ‘I don’t think it is fair that he is getting so much and makes me sick to my stomach.
‘My life has been ruined by the oil spill and BP are not looking after me because I do not have the right paperwork. ‘I don’t know how Tony Hayward can sleep at night.’
John Carleton, 57, who works on a charter boat in Fort Walton, Florida, said: ‘Will people be angry? Hell, of course. It’s going to be galling and a slap in the face for the fishermen who have lost everything.
‘Many of the fishermen who delayed putting in their claims are finding it tougher than before to get money from BP and some of them are going to lose the shirts on their backs.’
There was also criticism from families of those who lost loved ones in the Lockerbie bombing. BP executives are due to be questioned this week on what role, if any, the company played in securing the release of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, the only man convicted of 270 deaths when Pan Am Flight 103 was blown out of the sky over Scotland.
Frank Duggan, president of Victims of Pan Am 103 Inc, which represents the families of those killed, said: ‘With the hearing before Congress this week, some people will see this as bad timing. ‘It’s the chance to finally get some answers from BP and Mr Hayward, and it doesn’t look like he is going to be there.’
Captain Clueless walks the plank... but is he just a handy scapegoat?
By PAUL BRACCHI
Pouring oil on troubled waters usually means solving a crisis.
In Tony Hayward’s case, it has signified precisely the opposite.
For any chief executive at the centre of a global crisis, the PR skills – or lack of them – displayed by the hapless Mr Hayward would have been embarrassing enough.
For the chief executive of BP in the wake of the environmental catastrophe unleashed in the Gulf of Mexico, it has been nothing short of disastrous.
Episodes which stand out include the picture of Mr Hayward, in baseball cap and sunglasses, sailing around the Isle of Wight in June, some 4,500 miles away from the site of the spill off America’s south coast.
This earned him the nickname Captain Clueless in the U.S. Then there was his ill-chosen comment: ‘I would like my life back’, just six weeks after the oil rig explosion.
Not to mention ‘I think the environmental impact of this disaster is likely to be very, very modest’ ... the spill was ‘relatively tiny’ compared with the ‘very big ocean’ ... ‘Apollo 13 did not stop the space programme’.
And so on. Clearly Tony Hayward did not have a ‘good crisis’ – not in front of the cameras anyway – and for this he is paying the price.
He has also received death threats, hate mail and ‘nasty’ phone calls at the home near Sevenoaks, Kent, he shares with wife Maureen, a geophysicist and former BP employee, and their two children, Kieran, 19 and Tara, 15.
But hasn’t this whole affair also been riddled with hypocrisy and an underlying ‘anti-British’ theme from the very start, with Mr Hayward emerging as a very convenient scapegoat?
It was President Obama himself, remember, who announced that he wanted to ‘kick ass’ over this ‘British’ disaster, this from a man who was also accused of taking his eye off the ball by indulging in a leisurely five-hour round of golf for the second time in a week – around the same period Tony Hayward was relaxing on his boat.
Also, a decade has passed since the oil-producing giant changed its name from British Petroleum to BP, better to reflect its modern, multinational structure, rather than more parochial origins.
Yet by continually stressing the word ‘British’, the Obama administration chose to present America’s environmental disaster as being foreign, specifically British-inflicted.
Fallout: President Barack Obama, pictured visiting the communities affected by the spill, was critical of Mr Hayward's handling of the crisis
Today, while BP’s HQ remains in London, its corporate statistics are weighed towards the U.S. The board of 12 directors is split evenly between British and American nationals.
But almost 23,000 of its other employees are American, compared with 10,000 Brits. And guess who owned the rig, which exploded on April 20, claiming 11 lives?
Answer: American firms. President Obama would later compare the spill to the 9/11 attacks. That analogy caused dismay even in the States.
Not surprisingly, Tony Hayward became Public Enemy No 1 and hauled before the U.S. Congress, where he was dubbed the ‘Bumbler from BP’.
Admittedly, it was not the most assured performance and left the impression that he was trying to duck responsibility by refusing to answer questions some 65 times, replying to one interrogator: ‘I can’t answer that question because I wasn’t there.’
But where was Tony Hayward’s boss when he was taking all the flak? Carl-Henric Svanberg, BP’s Swedish chairman, was said to have begun an affair with blonde, married mother-of-three Louise Julian as his own marriage collapsed.
So enamoured was he with his new girlfriend that within days of the oil erupting, he allegedly whisked her away for a cruise on board his 77ft yacht. When he did finally surface, he told Radio 4’s Today programme that he cared about the ‘small people’ – words seen as patronising the individuals whose livelihoods had in one way or another, been blighted by the spill.
Sweden’s so-called answer to Richard Branson was later forced to issue a public apology in which he admitted that he had spoken clumsily.
Needless to say, Mr Svanberg is still in his job. Tony Hayward became BP’s chief executive in 2007, replacing Lord Browne, who had worked at BP since 1966 and earned the nickname the ‘Sun King’ for his lavish lifestyle.
The two men could not have been more different. Mr Hayward, a down-to-earth man brought up in Slough, Berkshire, was – unlike his predecessor – no celebrity administrator. Educated at Windsor Grammar School, he spent as much time on the playing fields as at his studies – captaining the local football team but also passing A-levels in economics, Chemistry and Geology before going to Birmingham University.
He joined BP in 1982, learning the oil business from the ground up as a geologist. One of his first tasks was searching for oil-bearing rocks in remote areas, taking on challenging assignments from offshore rigs in the North Sea to the jungles of South America.
He acquired experience as a project manager, group treasurer and head of BP’s exploration and production arm.
The irony, of course, is that, by common consent, Tony Hayward, in the words of one former BP chairman, has been a ‘superb chief executive – and that doesn’t change because of this accident’.
So is he a scapegoat – or simply being held to account for his failures? There’s no denying he’s handled himself terribly in public, but could it be that, as the British face of the company, he’s been made to bear more than his fair share of the blame?
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