BP officials scrambled on Saturday to respond to another public relations mess when their embattled chief executive, Tony Hayward, spent the day off the coast of England watching his yacht compete in one of the world’s largest races.
Two days after Hayward angered lawmakers on Capitol Hill with his refusal to provide details during testimony about the worst offshore oil spill in US history, and one day after BP’s chairman said the chief executive would not be as involved in daily operations in the Gulf, Hayward sparked new controversy from afar.
“He is having some rare private time with his son,” a BP spokeswoman, Sheila Williams, said in a telephone interview on Saturday.
However, Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff, who taped an interview for ABC’s This Week, called Hayward’s attendance at the race “part of a long line of PR gaffes and mistakes” that he has made.
“To quote Tony Hayward, he’s got his life back,” Emanuel said.
On May 31, six weeks after the spill began, Hayward said “I’d like my life back,” a comment that struck many in the Gulf region as insensitive, and for which he eventually apologized.
On Saturday, Alabama Senator Richard Shelby, a Republican, called Hayward’s yacht outing the “height of arrogance,” in an interview with Fox News.
“I can tell you that yacht ought to be here skimming and cleaning up a lot of the oil,” Shelby said. “He ought to be down here seeing what is really going on. Not in a cocoon somewhere.”
However, Hayward’s role in the Gulf became the topic of further speculation on Saturday, even as Williams, the BP spokeswoman, insisted that Hayward was still in charge of the company and the enormous cleanup operations.
“Tony receives regular updates from the Gulf,” she said in an e-mail message.
On Friday, the chairman of the board of BP, Carl-Henric Svanberg, told the British television network Sky News that Hayward would be “now handing over” the daily operations in the Gulf to Robert Dudley, an American who joined BP as part of its acquisition of Amoco a decade ago.
Svanberg, speaking a day after Hayward’s appearance in Washington, also acknowledged that Hayward’s comments have “upset people.”
Two days earlier, Svanberg himself apologized for having referred to victims of the oil spill as “small people.”
On Saturday, BP tried to clarify what Svanberg had said about the transition of leadership in the Gulf.
“What he meant by ‘now,’” Williams said, is that “there would be a transition over to Bob over a period of time.”
Williams said that Hayward himself announced the change in a June 4 meeting to shareholders, but that he was still in overall control of the company.
“Obviously,” she said, “Tony’s main priority remains overseeing all BP operations. Over all, there will be some responsibilities handed over, but Tony will remain in full control until we have stopped the leak.”
When that might happen is not clear.
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