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BP and The Man Who Broke It
By The Anglo American | July 8, 2010
The Deepwater Horizon
No, it is not Tony Haywood, the most vilified man in America. It is now apparent that he is taking the bullet for someone else. That man is Lord Browne, the previous, discredited CEO of BP. And it can now be seen that his tenure as CEO has wrecked the company.
Lord Browne is not a part of the British aristocratic tradition that his title suggests. His life peerage comes from what one might call the pay and favor awards from the New Labo{u}r Years. Two senior New Labo{u}r party officials were appointed to the BP board despite no experience of the oil business. George Orwell, had he lived, may well have enjoyed this moment when you consider the foundations of the British Labo{u}r party were to represent the interests of unionized working people. But the insidious political influence that swirled around the BP board prevented the, then chairman, Peter Sutherland, from getting rid of the newly appointed peer.
Lord Browne
And he needed to go. Lord Browne, as Chief Executive of BP, oversaw a massive expansion of the company with bold ventures from China to Russia and the United States. But his efforts to drive up profits came from driving down costs, as growth remained marginal. This, however, became counter-productive to safety. And in BP’s creative, high-risk environment that Browne had engineered, this proved to be a lethal strategy. It proved to be lethal for the 15 workers who lost their lives at the BP Texas City refinery. There were a further 170 who were injured. It proved to be equally lethal for the 11 workers, who lost their lives on Deep Water Horizon.
James Baker, the former US Secretary of State, said,
“BP has not provided effective process safety leadership and has not adequately established process safety as a core value”
BP admitted criminal damage over the pollution it had caused in Alaska and was fined $70 million. From what is known, BP has breeched US safety regulations over 700 times.
BP finally managed to rid themselves of Browne when he publicly disgraced himself. It is the mark of such change in Britain that the CEO of a large multi-national can tell the board that he or she is homosexual without fear of recrimination. Not that Browne was “out” in the sense that gay men and women would relate to or agree with. On the contrary Mr. Browne’s private life engaged the seedy secret world of an escort agency where he met Jeff Chavalier, 27, and paid to do so.
Jeff Chevalier
But that was not Browne’s downfall. When the British Daily Mail bought Chavalier’s four year kiss and tell story, Browne took out an injunction against publication. The Peer of the realm lied in court as to how the two met and relied on his reputation to imply that it was Chavalier who was lying. Mr Justice Eady pointed not only to Mr Browne’s …….
“willingness to tell a deliberate lie to the court, persisted in for about two weeks”
But also to Mr. Browne’s disregard for his former lover and……
“casually to trash the reputation of Mr Chevalier and to discredit him in the eyes of the court”.
Browne was lucky not to be jailed for perjury.
This was the BP that Tony Hayward inherited. But was he the man to cure BP’s corrupted culture? He certainly was not going to get any help from BP’s chairman. Carl Svanberg who was too busy with the British tabloid press and their obsession with his rather interesting private life.
Hayward, a geologist by training, focused on making sure that the Texas City disaster would never happen again. His personal disappointment can be seen in his demeanor in every picture taken of him since the Deepwater Horizon exploded. He knows he has failed to extinguish Browne’s legacy. While companies such as Exon were hiring engineers by the barrel load BP had been showing them the door. Sub-contracting was BP’s game and those contracts were driven by cost, not engineering. Circumstantial evidence suggests this may still be the case with the Deepwater Horizon platform. Yes it was Transocean’s rig but who told them what to do? And if Transocean Ltd. did not trust BP’s quality assurance towards safety then why did they carry out BP’s mandate and risk their own reputation and the lives of their employees?
The words of John Houston come to mind when his film’s producers once interfered in his directing. Houston showed his back to the moneymen, but they were close enough to hear him say to Robert Mitchum….
“Kid, if they want it bad they can have it bad. It’ll cost them a little more but they can have it bad.”
And what of the discredited Lord Browne? Britain’s new right wing government has just appointed him as the administration’s efficiency czar. No doubt this political chameleon will be very effective at wielding the financial knife. But, as the record shows, he appears to lack the skills to do this with any wisdom.
©The Anglo American
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July 3rd, 2011 at 5:07 pm
These corporate criminals have to executed not sued for their crimes to humanity!