BP spill 'scapegoat' gets his life back

The Deepwater Horizon oil spill was the worst offshore oil spill in US history. Photo / AP

One of the best moments of Tony Hayward's 28-year career with oil giant BP came before dawn on Christmas 1982. Hayward says he was aboard a freezing oil platform in the middle of the North Sea as the rig's drill struck oil.

The Miller field was the first major find for Hayward, then a 25-year-old geology PhD from the University of Edinburgh.

It became one of BP's most productive North Sea assets, yielding 345 million barrels of oil over its lifetime.

The worst moments of Hayward's BP career are far better known. On April 20 last year BP's Macondo well in the Gulf of Mexico exploded, killing 11 workers on the Deepwater Horizon oil platform and unleashing the worst offshore oil spill in US history.

The disaster erased more than $100 billion from BP's market value in two months, and the company took a $41 billion charge against income to cover fines, clean-up costs and compensation to Gulf fishermen and property owners.

Macondo also cost Hayward his job as BP's chief executive officer after a string of public relations fiascos that included his saying "I would like my life back" to a group of reporters while touring an oil-slicked beach in Louisiana.

While Hayward's reputation in the US is as fouled as some Gulf Coast beaches were after the spill, he still is welcome in the oil patch.

"People know he was the scapegoat, he was the sacrificial lamb," says Fadel Gheit, an oil and gas analyst at Oppenheimer & Co.

The disaster thrust Hayward into a role for which he was ill prepared, according to a friend who also worked at BP. Hayward was uncomfortable speaking in front of crowds and on camera, said the friend, who asked not to be named. Hayward himself struck a philosophical pose about the disaster.

"Sometimes you step off the pavement and get hit by a bus," he said while announcing his resignation. Hayward refused to answer questions about his departure for this story.

Now, Hayward, 54, is getting his life back. A year after leaving BP, he's again at the helm of a publicly traded company.

He teamed up with financier Nathaniel Rothschild, scion of the banking family, to create Vallares Plc, a shell company that raised £1.33 billion ($2.5 billion) through an initial public offering on the London Stock Exchange on June 17.

Hayward also serves on the board of TNK-BP International, BP's fractious Russian joint venture. Glencore International Plc, the mining and commodities-trading company that went public in London and Hong Kong in May, raising $10.3 billion, named him its senior non-executive director.

Hayward said he hoped to recreate the excitement he felt in the early years of his BP career at Vallares, which is seeking oil industry acquisitions in emerging markets. "I am a geologist, and that remains very much in my blood," he said. "I love the exploration end of the business."

Hayward's background contrasts with that of his business partner. The eldest of seven children, Hayward was born in Slough, an industrial town just west of London. His father was a mid-level manager in a textile mill; his mother, an administrator at Britain's National Health Service. He attended state schools and earned his undergraduate degree from Aston University in Birmingham.

Hayward's big break at BP came in 1990, when John Browne, the company's head of exploration and production and later its CEO, tapped him to be a Turtle - a name derived from the cartoon Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

Selected in pairs each year, the Turtles served as Browne's aides-de-camp, standing at his elbow as he negotiated multibillion-dollar deals as well as making sure that his office was stocked with El Rey del Mundo Cuban cigars and bottles of Montrachet.

After this apprenticeship, the Turtles were fast-tracked through the BP hierarchy. Hayward was steadily promoted, becoming chief of BP's exploration and production division, the company's main profit driver, in 2003.

In 2007, when Browne resigned after becoming embroiled in a scandal involving his personal life, the board unanimously chose Hayward to replace him. Compared with the Cambridge-educated Browne, Hayward was perceived by colleagues as down-to-earth and self-effacing, several people who worked with him said. He turned Browne's office suite into a conference room and replaced the modern art adorning the hallways with photographs of BP service stations, oil rigs and refineries.

As he works to restore his reputation, Hayward may be courting new risks. Vallares, the company he founded with Rothschild, 40, is a so-called blank-cheque company: It had no assets when it went public. Such firms have stirred controversy by allowing less-than-transparent emerging-markets companies to obtain stock exchange listings in London and the US.

Given BP's environmental record, environmentalists are snickering about Hayward's role at Glencore, whose prospectus included reports of water pollution, hazardous dust and toxic clouds at its mines. Hayward was named to the Glencore board's health, safety and environment committee.

"It is ironic in many ways," said Craig Bennett, director of policy and campaigns at Friends of the Earth UK. Charlie Kronick, senior climate adviser for Greenpeace UK, said, "These are industries that are increasingly operating at the edge, and when you operate at the edge, there is a good chance you'll fall off."

Hayward says Vallares plans to target companies in such places as Russia, Latin America, Africa and the Middle East. He said the most likely candidates were privately owned, family-controlled companies that lack the ability to raise capital or attract talent.

"For an emerging-market company, privately owned, to come to the London market is a three- or four-year process with no guarantee of success," Hayward says. "So to have the opportunity to merge with the sort of thing we've created can be very attractive."

In reverse mergers, a shell company uses its stock to buy an operating company. It winds up with the assets, but the target company's shareholders gain a controlling interest in the former shell company's shares. In the US, the Securities and Exchange Commission has warned that reverse mergers allow foreign businesses to bypass the usual listing requirements.

"It only makes sense to go the reverse-merger route if there is a reason you could not go the traditional route," said William Sjostrom, a professor at the University of Arizona's law school who has written about blank-check companies and reverse mergers.

"That means an under-writer looked under the hood and said no, so you are getting less-quality companies."

Vallares is modelled on Vallar Plc, a blank-check company Rothschild founded with James Campbell, a veteran mining executive, and took public on the London Stock Exchange last summer, raising £707 million.

In its prospectus, Vallar said only that it intended to acquire a company in base metals, iron ore or coal mining.

"There are not many people in the world who can raise a billion dollars and say, 'Hey, we'll tell you what it's for later,' but Nat Rothschild is one of them," said Richard Knights, an analyst at Liberum Capital in London.

Investor interest in Hayward's Vallares was so intense that the company raised £328 million more than planned. For Hayward, it was a heartening vote of confidence after his ignominious departure from BP.

"We are quite pleased with the support we've received," he said.

The ghost of Macondo still dogs Hayward. In May, travellers muttered about the disaster as they watched Hayward being escorted through an immigration line at New York's Kennedy Airport, according to a Bloomberg Markets reporter who saw the incident.

He's a defendant in two consolidated class-action lawsuits in the US resulting from Macondo, which could cost BP $6 billion, according to a Citigroup estimate. US Representative Michael Burgess, a Texas Republican who ripped into Hayward on June 17, 2010, during Hayward's Congressional testimony on the spill, said, "I don't think the time is right for rehabilitation."

HAYWARD RISES AGAIN

* Former BP chief Tony Hayward has teamed up with financier Nathaniel Rothschild, scion of the banking family, to create Vallares Plc, a shell company that raised GBP 1.33 billion ($2.5 billion) through an IPO.

* Serves on the board of TNK-BP International, BP's fractious Russian joint venture.

* Advises AEA Investors LLC, a New York-based private-equity firm that manages $5 billion in investments, and Numis Securities.

- BLOOMBERG