Super Moderator
Location: essex ma
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so it's official:
Quote:
BP Will Fulfill Commitments in the Gulf, New Chief Says
By JULIA WERDIGIER
LONDON — Robert Dudley, BP’s newly appointed chief executive, said Tuesday that the oil giant remained committed to its business in the United States as it moved to sell $30 billion in assets before 2012 to pay for costs related to the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
BP on Tuesday set aside $32.2 billion to deal with the aftermath of the spill, leading to a record second-quarter loss of $17 billion. That compared with a $4.4 billion profit in the period a year ago.
The company picked Mr. Dudley, an American, to succeed Tony Hayward at the beginning of October. He would be BP’s first non-British chief executive. Mr. Hayward is stepping down after criticism of the way he handled the spill.
Mr. Dudley, who was joined by a visibly tired and saddened Mr. Hayward at BP’s headquarters Tuesday, pledged to stick to BP’s commitments in the Gulf, which includes cleaning up the oil and compensating residents.
“We will fulfill the promises we’ve made,” Mr. Dudley said at a media briefing in London. “Meeting our commitments is critical for BP’s long-term success. Taking over this role, I will not reduce my commitment in the region.”
He added that “it’s not our intention to exit the U.S. nor do we believe we will have to. We fully intend to maintain those businesses and restore our position in the Gulf.”
BP said the planned sales, which represent less than 10 percent of its total assets, would mainly affect its upstream business and leave BP with a smaller but higher quality exploration and production operation. The company chairman Carl-Henric Svanberg said the sales did not represent a change of strategy but were more about “adjusting the portfolio.”
In an emotional statement, Mr. Hayward, who had been chief executive since 2007, said his departure should allow BP to move forward and repair its reputation. “It’s a very sad day personally,” Mr. Hayward said. “I love this company and everything that it stands for” but “for it to move on, particularly in the U.S., it needs a new leadership.”
Mr. Hayward angered American policy makers and gulf fishermen with the way he handled the spill, and many investors regarded his departure as necessary even if they did not blame him personally for the disaster at the Macondo well. He is the second BP chief executive to leave following a major accident. His predecessor John Browne had lost support after a string of setbacks that included a blast at a Texas refinery in 2005 and leaking oil pipelines in Alaska.
BP said it planned to nominate Mr. Hayward as a nonexecutive director of TNK-BP, its Russian venture.
Mr. Dudley, 54, grew up in Mississippi and has been in charge of BP’s response to the spill for the last month. His appointment was widely expected among analysts and investors, who are hoping that he can help repair BP’s reputation in the United States, where it is most tarnished. BP has about a third of its business interests and 40 percent of its shareholders and employees in the United States.
BP has succeeded in stopping oil from spewing into the gulf, but the company is still drilling relief wells and will have to deal with the spill’s consequences for some time. Mr. Dudley’s experience in running BP’s joint venture in Russia, where he clashed in 2008 with the company’s business partners and the Russian government, is expected to help him in mending relations with Washington and residents of the Gulf Coast. BP will need political backing if it seeks to drill new wells in the gulf, as some investors hope it will.
Mr. Dudley will also have to rebuild morale among employees who had just watched their company recover from the aftermath of the deadly explosion at its Texas City, Tex., facility only to witness another tragic accident.
He has been with BP since it bought Amoco in 1998, and he said he had been shocked by the damage caused by the spill when he visited the region in June.
“The charge is bigger than expected, but I’m not disappointed,” said Nick McGregor, investment manager at Redmayne-Bentley, a stock brokerage firm in Britain. “They are trying to draw a line under this and get Bob a clean sheet to move forward, but the difficulty is that the litigation challenge persists.”
BP’s shares rose 4.6 percent in London Monday when BP’s board met to discuss the leadership changes. They were up 0.1 percent on Tuesday. The company has lost about 35 percent of its market value since the April 20 explosion of the Deepwater Horizon rig, although shares have rebounded from the lows registered a few weeks ago.
Mr. Hayward, asked how he felt about the oil spill given that he pledged to improve safety standards in light of the Texas City explosion, said he “was determined not to have a repeat” of such an accident but “sometimes you step off the pavement and get hit by a bus.”
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http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/28/bu...ef=global-home
and so's a pretty large-scale selloff of assets:
FT.com / Energy - BP plans $30bn sales to meet Gulf costs
poor criminal corporate person bp:
Quote:
BP's record as a market manipulator
Let's not forget that BP's record includes accusations--and evidence--of wrongdoing that go well beyond the Deepwater Horizon explosion. The company, which announced a $17 billion loss Tuesday, also has faced civil and criminal charges that it uses its massive financial resources to manipulate the energy market.
We already know that BP missed warning signs before the Deepwater Horizon explosion that led to the biggest oil spill in U.S. history. We know that BP's business partners said the energy giant acted "unsafely." And we know that, after the fact, BP altered photos to make it seem like it was keeping a more watchful eye than it was.
But less than three years ago, BP agreed to pay hundreds of millions of dollars to several federal regulators to settle fraud allegations that it cornered the propane market and inflated heating and cooking costs for millions of mostly rural American homes.
It was the largest commodities manipulation in U.S. history.
In the case, BP faced criminal charges from the Department of Justice and civil charges from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. In the end, the company agreed to pay $303 million in penalties and entered into a deferred prosecution agreement under which it would not face criminal penalties if it agreed to a host of sanctions.
"BP engaged in a massive manipulation," said Walt Lukken, the acting CFTC chairman at the time.
The alleged fraud was carried out in 2004 by one of BP's subsidiaries, Illinois-based BP America Production Company, which traded energy futures on behalf of the firm. The company and several of its traders sought to corner the market for propane transported between the Gulf Coast and the Northeast and Midwest, according to the government.
They did this by using the massive financial resources of BP to purchase such a large number of propane futures that the firm appeared to own more propane than actually existed. That pushed up the price of propane, and BP could sell a portion of their supply to other businesses at inflated values, earning the firm tens of millions of dollars in profits.
The CFTC also alleged that BP attempted to corner the propane market once before, in 2003.
Settling the case was, ironically, one of the measures taken by then new chief executive Tony Howard to put legal squabbles behind the company. Also announced today was that American Robert Dudley would take over Oct. 1 as BP's next chief executive, replacing Howard.
Until Howard took over, the company tried to fight the regulatory charges. It ended up settling the market manipulation case as well as a variety of other charges that the company violated environmental standards
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Market Cop - BP's record as a market manipulator
an editorial from le monde on haywoods departure entitled "the fall of the head of bp: the end of impunity"
La chute du patron de BP : la fin de l'impunité - LeMonde.fr
meanwhile, back in the general vicinity of the actual spill, a plan from a coalition of environmentalist groups on this, day 99 of the disaster:
Quote:
Environmentalists link oil spill response, coastal restoration
Published: Monday, July 26, 2010, 11:45 PM Updated: Tuesday, July 27, 2010, 7:36 AM
Mark Schleifstein, The Times-Picayune Mark Schleifstein, The Times-Picayune
Speed the reconstruction of Louisiana's coastal wetlands by tapping offshore oil revenue and dedicating a significant share of any penalties levied against BP, a group of influential national and local environmental groups urged Navy Secretary and Gulf Coast oil spill recovery leader Ray Mabus in a letter published today in advertisements in The Times-Picayune, the Advocate of Baton Rouge, Washington-based Roll Call magazine, and the online publication Politico.
"We applaud the President for giving you the restoration mandate and ask you to move with the urgency our battered coast demands," said the advertisement, sponsored by America's Wetland Foundation and published in cooperation with the National Wildlife Federation, Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana, Environmental Defense Fund, the Nature Conservancy, National Audubon Society and Ducks Unlimited.
"Americans care," said the ad. "They know the world is watching and that history is recording this moment of opportunity or lost promise."
Restoring the Mississippi River's southernmost delta, a wetland area rich in natural resources, "is the single most important way to make this region whole again," said Larry Schweiger, president and CEO of the National Wildlife Federation. "The survival of this region's productive fisheries, its abundant wildlife habitat and its hardworking coastal communities hinges on healthy, regenerative wetlands along Louisiana's coast."
The advertisement urges Mabus, a former governor of Mississippi, to support six steps aimed at speeding Louisiana's coastal restoration efforts:
* Accelerating the payment of a greater share of federal revenue from Outer Continental Shelf oil and gas leases to Louisiana and other Gulf states. The existing revenue-sharing law would provide about $200 million a year to Louisiana in 2017.
* Arranging immediate financing for new freshwater and sediment diversion and barrier island reconstruction projects already authorized by Congress.
* Establishing a dedicated long-term funding stream sufficient for Louisiana's long-term coastal restoration plan. The ad does not say where that money would come from.
* Ensuring a significant percentage of penalty payments resulting from the BP oil spill are dedicated to coastal restoration "as reparations for the contamination of thousands of acres of coastal marsh that cannot be cleaned up."
* Cutting red tape to speed payment of existing federal appropriations for restoration projects, including more than $1 billion owed coastal states under the federal Coastal Impact Assistance Program.
* Creating a federal-state authority to oversee coastal restoration efforts that has the ability to act quickly enough to stave off further wetlands loss.
The organizations backing the ad all have been major players in Louisiana's coastal restoration efforts. America's WETLAND Foundation was created with state backing in 2002 to raise awareness nationally about the state's wetlands problems.
Officials with the Environmental Defense Fund have been directly involved in writing and implementing the state's coastal restoration master plan, and have sat on the Governor's Advisory Commission for Coastal Protection, Restoration and Conservation.
In addition to their support for restoration efforts nationwide, the National Wildlife Federation, Audubon, Nature Conservancy and Ducks Unlimited all own coastal refuge land or have underwritten expensive restoration projects along the coast.
The Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana, which represents a wide variety of state environmental groups and businesses, also has been instrumental in shaping the state's restoration plans.
Obama named Mabus as oil spill restoration chief in mid-June, and Mabus has said his marching orders include looking at long-term ways of restoring the coast.
"The secretary continues to work to develop a long-range plan for restoration of the Gulf Coast economically and environmentally," said his spokeswoman, Navy Capt. Beci Brenton. "He continues to meet with stakeholders to insure that the genesis of the plan actually comes from the people and organizations that understand the issues of the Gulf the best."
"Secretary Mabus' commitment that recovery plans should come from within the region itself is welcomed," said R. King Milling, chairman of America's Wetland Foundation. "Louisiana has a master plan for coastal restoration and protection unanimously approved by the Legislature, as well as congressional authorizations, that sit idly without funding. Acting on these plans, especially those that reconnect the river to the wetlands, is what is needed now."
Brenton said Mabus expects to present his plan to the president in 60 to 90 days, but it's unclear how long it would take to get the approval of Congress necessary to adopt most of the measures proposed in the ad.
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Environmentalists link oil spill response, coastal restoration | NOLA.com
meanwhile in the general vicinity of the actual spill:
The Oil Drum | BP's Deepwater Oil Spill - Restarting Progress - and Open Thread
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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