ANYONE who saw Chief Executive Tony Hayward's stubborn performance at a US Congressional Committee inquiry in June would have known that BP's corporate tactics on the Deepwater Horizon oil slick were wholly evasive and self-serving. This week's report into the causes of the disaster confirms this impression.
The main subcontractors on the rig, Halliburton and Transocean, are blamed for five of the eight main reasons for the explosion-- an assessment that may be technically correct but which overlooks the responsibility carried by BP for choosing these companies and for the oversight of their performance. Transocean reacted immediately by pointing to BP's cost-saving decisions that increased risk, in some cases, severely -- a response that hit BP where its reputation is weakest.
Beyond the deaths of the rig's crew, the spilling of five million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico and the consequent environmental disaster, and the huge compensation costs, there stands a greatly diminished company, no longer Britain's principal industrial standard-bearer, whose operational incompetence has been compounded by unwarranted arrogance and appalling public relations. The final responsibility must rest with BP's almost invisible chairman, Carl-Henrig Svanberg, who followed earlier absences at critical moments by absenting himself this week from the presentation of the report on the disaster, which should have been the moment when BP showed it has a strong leader to take it into the future.
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