I wonder what the odds are that you have never heard of him, it is rather stunning that we haven't seen more of him.
Well he just happens to be the Chairman of the Board.
Whilst the CEO of BP runs around like a headless chicken creating aural damage to go along with environmental catastrophe, the rest of the pack of weasels that make up the BP board of directors are notably silent.
Even the Telegraph wondered about him last year
So does his relative obscurity matter? I think the answer is probably yes, at least in the short term. He doesn't seem to be well known in diplomatic circles and that's a big part of the role. He'll be dealing, on sensitive issues, with politicians and civil servants as much as other business people or shareholders.
Well I think they have an answer to their initial concern.
The Chairman of the board of directors of BP has been stunningly silent during this three ring circus.
Well it looks as if his own executives have woken up:
Senior BP directors want their chairman, Carl-Henric Svanberg, sacked because they claim his mishandling of the Gulf of Mexico disaster has turned a crisis into a catastrophe.
The BP directors, speaking under terms of anonymity, told The Independent on Sunday yesterday that a growing number of the oil company's high-level executives are so appalled by Mr Svanberg's low-profile role since the Gulf spill over a month ago that they think he should be told to quit.
Nobody is going to fire Tony Hayward just yet, finding a bastard greedy enough to fill that role at the present time may prove trying, unless of course Carl-Henric Svanberg had stepped up to the plate.
Well after this mess the BP court will have its bloodshed and a new Baron will be appointed. The PR campaign will start and flocks of barristers in black will be hired to defend their sullied reputation. A new corporate page will be turned, and as the stink of death emanates from the gulf assurances will be given.
Now this little peach of a maneuver.
BP is to hive off its Gulf of Mexico oil spill operation to a separate in-house business to be run by an American in a bid to isolate the "toxic" side of the company and dilute some of the anti-British feeling aimed at chief executive Tony Hayward, the company said today.
So the board is doing something, running away.
Ye gawds.
Perhaps next time they choose a CEO and Chairman they might want to check their competences rather than to what clubs they belong.
Meanwhile the facts are slowly coming out.
They pushed for more insight into an argument on the rig that day between a manager for BP, the well’s owner, and one for Transocean, the rig’s owner, and asked Curt R. Kuchta, the rig’s captain, how the crew knew who was in charge.
"It’s pretty well understood amongst the crew who’s in charge," he said.
"How do they know that?" a Coast Guard investigator asked.
"I guess, I don’t know," Captain Kuchta said. "But it’s pretty well — everyone knows."
The facts being.......
hmmmm
Nobody had a clue?
The next shareholders meeting should be quite something, of Shakespearean proportions no doubt
And such an instrument I was to use.
Mine eyes are made the fools o' the other senses,
Or else worth all the rest; I see thee still,
And on thy blade and dudgeon gouts of blood,
Which was not so before. There's no such thing:
It is the bloody business which informs
Thus to mine eyes. Now o'er the one halfworld
Nature seems dead, and wicked dreams abuse
Macbeth: Act 2 Scene 1.
Some of the damage is now becoming apparent
For more than a decade, the hundreds of brown pelicans that nested among the mangrove shrubs on Queen Bess Island, south of New Orleans, were living proof that a species brought to the edge of extinction could come back and thrive.
The island was one of three sites in Louisiana where pelicans were reintroduced after pesticides wiped them out in the state in the 1960s.
But on Thursday, 29 of them, their feathers so coated in thick brown sludge that their white and grey markings were obscured, were airlifted to a bird rehabilitation centre in Fort Jackson, South Carolina, the latest victims of the Deepwater Horizon disaster. Another dozen went to other rescue centres.
Long term damage at least decades
The Exxon Valdez spill of 11 million gallons killed as many as 700,000 sea birds and 5,000 sea otters initially, but even 21 years later, populations of sea otters in areas of Prince William Sound haven't recovered. The Pacific herring population collapsed after the spill for reasons that remain in dispute among scientists. Two intensely studied pods of killer whales in the sound suffered heavy losses in the spill and have struggled since. One of the two pods has no more reproductive females. It is doomed to extinction.
And the oil?
"It's still sitting there," said Stan Rice, program manager for habitat studies at the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration's Auke Bay Fisheries Lab. "It's still liquid, you can still smell it and touch it."
The Exxon Valdez was a spill, I cant find words to describe the present catastrophe in a rational way yet.
Perhaps, oil flood?