The Fleet Street newspapers are having a rollicking good time tearing apart John Browne, the lord whose 41-year career at BP came to sensational end on Tuesday when he admitted to lying about his relationship with a young Canadian man.
"Gay lord quits BP," was the Daily Mirror's headline yesterday. An inside article about the CEO of the company once known as British Petroleum was called "Big Porkies." Rupert Murdoch's Sun had no such wit - "Tycoon and the Rent Boy" was the headline - followed by a thorough analysis of the dating website, , where Lord Browne, now 59, and Jeff Chevalier, 27, allegedly met.
The British analysts and investment bankers did not enjoy the papers' tawdry sport. One top banker, who did not want to be quoted by name, told The Globe and Mail that "we're depressed by the whole thing. Browne built the most powerful British company of the late 20th Century and threw his career away with a silly lie."
In applying for an injunction to stop The Mail on Sunday newspaper from publishing stories about his relationship with Mr. Chevalier, Lord Brown lied about the circumstances under which he met his Canadian lover. The judge said he was not prepared to make allowances for a "white lie" told to the court, especially from a man who "refers to the various honours he has received under the present Government."
Analysts are not writing notes condemning Lord Browne, even though they are disappointed in the way his career came to an end. They have enormous respect for the CEO who turned BP into one of the London Stock Exchange's premier value-creation machines.
In the industry, Lord Browne, who is 5-foot-6, is known as "small but perfect." Executives who know him say he has a passion for, and deep knowledge of, cooking, music and ballet. "When he came to dinner, I would put on the most obscure piece of music I could think of and John would always know it," said an executive who knows him.
When Lord Browne became CEO in 1995, BP was not the global titan it is today, with annual sales of $274-billion (U.S.) and a market value of $216-billion, putting it among top three market-listed energy players. At that point, the company was struggling with high costs and low oil prices. It risked relegation to "B" status, behind the top names such as Exxon and Mobil (which merged in 1999).
Lord Browne's boldest move came at that point. He bought Amoco Corp., one of the biggest American oil companies, for $61-billion (Amoco had gained a big presence in Western Canada through the 1988 purchase of Dome Petroleum). At the time, oil was trading at about $10 a barrel. The price has since climbed more than 500 per cent, making the Amoco purchase one of the industry's most astute takeovers.
Two years later, BP bought two more famous industry names, Atlantic Richfield Co. and Burmah Castrol, the maker of motor oils. Lord Browne's company was suddenly a rival to Exxon.
Lord Browne's record is far from perfect. His "Beyond Petroleum" environmental campaign never went much beyond slick PR. His penchant for cost cutting came back to haunt him - in 2005, an explosion at BP's Texas City refinery killed 15 workers. A year later, the U.S. federal Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board determined that cost-cutting led to the explosion.
In early 2006, several thousand barrels of crude spilled from a ruptured BP pipeline in Alaska's Prudhoe Bay field and U.S. environmental regulators opened a criminal investigation. A few months later, the company found a corroded pipeline and shut down Prudhoe, one of the world's biggest oil fields. If all this weren't enough, the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission informed BP that it intended to hit the company with a civil enforcement action over the trading of gasoline futures.
Until the string of bad news, Lord Browne had hinted he wanted to stay in the CEO's position for another year or two. In January, Tony Hayward was announced as the next CEO and Lord Browne was to retire in July. He resigned in disgrace on Tuesday, but leaves behind a global energy champion that is respected by investors.
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SOURCE: THOMSON DATASTREAM
Eric Reguly