BP Replaces Its Gaffe Prone Executive Tony Hayward

British Petroleum (BP) has been racked with public relations blunders (hereinafter PR), and, perhaps, no PR blunder caused more damage to BP than its executive, Tony Hayward, opining that he wants his life back. This was a very callous remark because there were men and women who lost their lives when the rig blew; in addition, the people of the Gulf Coast were I am certain going through more travails – many losing their livelihood for the foreseeable future.  The decision by BP must have been easy to replace Mr. Hayward and send him back home to England; he was replaced by Managing Director Bob Dudley. It was yesterday that Mr. Hayward appeared before Congress and frustrated the Congressmen by refusing to answer questions pertaining to the spill.

The truth is that Mr. Hayward did what he was supposed to do from a legal point of view when he was summoned to the halls of power. If Hayward, in anyway, intimated that BP expressly or impliedly engaged in negligence – and more than likely it did – he would have been subjected to criminal charges, whereby his words would have come back to haunt him.

There were no offers by the Congress of Transactional Immunity or the like to compel Hayward’s testimony and he would have been imprudent to answer Congress’ queries. If the tragedy of the Gulf spill weren’t so visceral, it would have been rather funny. Most of these law makers questioning Hayward are themselves lawyers and knew that Mr. Hayward would and could not answer the queries that would put him in jeopardy of criminal charges or subject BP to civil actions. It is true that these legal actions are coming… but al those Congress men who were berating Hayward’s silence would have done the same or if they were representing him… would have prepped him to not address certain aspects of the spill, which would make him criminally/civilly culpable.

Permit me to digress a little, as I write, it is being reported that actor Kevin Costner (see earlier articles addressing this issue) machines that he commissioned and owned, which separate oil from water, will be put into service by BP to help in cleaning up the Gulf. Costner, earlier in the day had addressed the Congress after he was informed that BP was going to employ his machines. It is rather ironic that Costner’s commissioned these machines to help the cleaning up of the refuge generated during the filming of his Apocalyptic movie, Water World.

According to LA Times, "BP's chairman, Carl-Henric Svanberg, told Sky News television in Britain that Hayward was handing over daily operations to managing director Robert Dudley, a Mississippi native who started his career at Chicago-based Amoco Corp., which BP bought in 1998. Dudley has handled sensitive international assignments for BP in Russia and Africa."