Tony Hayward, Former BP Chief, Returns to Oil

The following is an excerpt from an article in 

The New York Times
Sunday, September 02, 2012

Tony Hayward, Former BP Chief, Returns to Oil

By STANLEY REED

LONDON

IF there’s a public villain of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill — one person who, rightly or not, will be remembered for the deadly blowout, the black slick and all that followed — it’s probably Tony Hayward.

On television screens and in the pages of magazines, bewildered Americans saw oil plumes rising, livelihoods crumbling and seabirds dying in the viscous crude. And for many of them, Mr. Hayward, the man who was running BP, came to personify the catastrophe.

And yet here he is now, looking so cool and relaxed, so unlike the Tony Hayward we know.

He’s sitting, open-collar casual, in a comfortable corner office here in Mayfair, not far from his old headquarters at BP.

Could this possibly be that Tony Hayward — the pinched, sweaty chieftain of British Big Oil? The Englishman whom Americans derided as an insensitive buffoon — and whom President Obama said he would have fired? The man who sailed his yacht off the Isle of Wight as the tar balls washed up on the Gulf Coast? Who, in the middle of it all, delivered that crisis-P.R. sound bite from hell: “I’d like my life back.”

Yes, this is that Tony Hayward, looking his elfin, curly haired self and sounding more upbeat than he has in a long time.

Mr. Hayward, it turns out, has his life back.

Two years after being shown the door at BP, in one of the most ignominious corporate exits in recent memory, Mr. Hayward is back in the oil game. Not at an oil major like BP nor, for that matter, in the gulf, where oil rigs and refineries were being tested anew last week, this time by Hurricane Isaac. No, Tony Hayward is hoping to strike it rich in, of all places, the oil fields of northern Iraq.

He has some deep pockets behind him. They include a scion of the Rothschild banking dynasty, a former dealmaker at Goldman Sachs and two Turkish tycoons with a foothold in the wild and wildly contentious world of Iraqi oil. It’s a dangerous game, financially and otherwise. But despite sectarian bombings and political deadlock, Iraq’s crude oil production is soaring. In July, the nation produced more than three million barrels of oil a day, the most in a decade, eclipsing Iran and shaking up the old order in OPEC.

Yet oil has also brought its share of problems in Iraq, breeding corruption and aggravating tensions with the Kurdish minority in the north. And Kurdistan is precisely where Mr. Hayward and his partners are making their play.

The Kurdish region has vast, virtually untapped reserves, and its oil minister is carrying out plans to export oil and gas directly to Turkey, just to the north. But Baghdad’s central government maintains that it alone has the right to negotiate contracts and exports. The rivalry between Baghdad and Erbil, the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan, has nerves on edge throughout the region.

“It is a question of sovereignty, not money,” says David L. Goldwyn, who served as special envoy for international energy affairs for Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Whatever the risks, oil majors like Chevron and Exxon Mobil are rushing into Kurdistan, too. But Mr. Hayward isn’t running an oil giant like BP anymore. He’s running an oil pipsqueak. From his offices here on Grafton Street, he leads a company called Genel Energy. It is hardly a household name. On the London stock market, the company is currently worth about $3 billion. BP, known the world over is worth about 44 times that.

Yet for Mr. Hayward, Genel is more than a business opportunity. It is also a shot at redemption — a venture that, if it succeeds, could help bind up the psychic wounds of the gulf spill. Whatever his reputation in the United States, Mr. Hayward is regarded by many in the British business community as a solid C.E.O. who was dealt a bad hand. Many here insist that he was unfairly criticized, by Mr. Obama on down, for an environmental disaster that no one could have foreseen or prevented.

Whatever the case, Mr. Hayward declines to discuss the spill publicly. Friends and business associates say privately that he remains embittered by how he was vilified and then pushed out at BP.

He hardly comes across as angry. To the contrary, he looks unusually chipper on this July afternoon in Mayfair.

“I have been lucky,” Mr. Hayward says. “Having the opportunity to do something like this is fantastic.”

He continues: “It is fair to say I wanted to recover some of my self-esteem.”

For more, visit www.nytimes.com.