It became clear both for the board and for Tony, that in going forward, in rebuilding the company’s strength and in rebuilding its reputation, we needed a fresh leadership and that's what we are announcing today. Why do you need fresh leadership if he's done such a good job?
I think it is, in view of the Macondo well and everything that have happened and I think it became clear that you needed in this case, a new face, a new man to lead this. And of course, especially America is our biggest market. That is also important. So I think it became difficult for him to take on that toss. I mean clearly the board was reluctant to ditch Tony Hayward. It seems that you've crumbled to American political pressure, at what point did you crumble? Well, that is not true at all, because we have been absolutely focused on stopping the flow of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. That was the absolutely first and most important thing. Now that we are not spreading any more oil since almost 2 weeks was the first and right moment to start things forward about how we rebuild the company and that was addressed. The leadership of the company was never discussed when I was in the White House and through any of those negotiations.
You are shrinking the company in a fact, selling 30 billion dollars of assets. You don't need to do that. It seems a bit panicky.
No, it's not panicky. I think any company of our kind, remember that we have a portfolio of 250 billion dollars of assets, any company of that kind would have, there would always be assets that you are in an aging portfolio, things that you would like to had, places where you would like to get stronger. Other, other places or assets that you have that fit much better into somebody else's portfolio. So this is a crisis that nobody would have liked to happen of course. But it also creates a moment that we can reset our position and by selling assets we proceeds some 25 to 30 billion of value. That is of course a way of demonstrating that there should be no worry about our ability to meet the financial obligations. And still we talk about temperature and our total portfolio. It doesn't fundamentally change BP.
That 30 billion, 32 billion you've set aside to cover all the costs I guess, including fines. Do you expect to spend all of that?
Well, it’s the costs that we believe today with that we will need to meet. And they are also based on our belief that we are not growth like that. That doesn't mean that, that is exactly that the amount that couldn't be any other costs developing. Those are the costs that we know of today and some of it is estimates. |