Tony Hayward News

Former senior Goldman Sachs and HSBC banker Matthew Westerman is launching a private investment firm alongside a former colleague and a Greek shipping tycoon, he said on Friday.Westerman will partner his former Goldman Sachs colleague Julian Metherell and Peter Livanos, who owns Greek shipping company Ceres Hellenic, in a new firm called MW&L Capital Partners.The trio will invest in small-to-medium sized targets based on knowledge built up in their respective careers covering financial services, oil and gas, and shipping, Westerman said."We think there is a gap in the market for long-term capital; ours is not '5 year fund money' so we don't have money burning a hole in our pockets and we can afford to be flexible and supportive of management when we see an opportunity…

BP released the findings of its internal investigation into the Deepwater Horizon explosion and oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico. The company said no single factor caused the Macondo well tragedy. Rather, a sequence of failures involving a number of different parties led to the explosion and fire which killed 11 people and caused widespread pollution in the Gulf of Mexico earlier this year. •    Even after explosion and fire had disabled its crew-operated controls, the rig’s blow-out preventer on the sea-bed should have activated automatically to seal the well. But it failed to operate, probably because critical components were not working.

Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.) last week introduced the “Stop Oil Spills Act,” a bill to fund research into new oil spill prevention and response technologies. Following BP CEO Tony Hayward’s admission that his company did not have a “tool-kit” to respond to a sizeable spill from a deep-water well, Markey introduced the bill to create a research program to develop 21st century oil safety and spill response technologies. “As the big oil companies have continued to push the limits to drill ultra-deep…

According to a June 24 report from Bloomberg, the BP Plc manager who oversaw the well that erupted in April has been placed on leave while at least four federal agencies probe the disaster. The report said that Donald Vidrine, the well site leader aboard the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig that exploded and sank, said in an interview yesterday that he has been on administrative leave since the incident. Vidrine was the top-ranking BP decision-maker on duty aboard the rig when it was rocked by a surge of gas from beneath the sea floor, Chief Executive Officer Tony Hayward told a House panel last week. Just hours before the disaster, Vidrine overruled objections from representatives of rig owner Transocean Ltd.

(June 11, 9:00 a.m. MODERATOR: Good morning. Welcome to today’s briefing. We’ll follow the standard format today. Admiral [Thad] Allen will give the daily update and then we’ll take 10 minutes of questions from the floor and 10 minutes from the phone. Admiral? ADMIRAL ALLEN: Thank you. Good morning. Since it’s Friday, I thought I’d review some of the basic numbers of the response and talk a little bit about some strategic issues regarding the skimmers which are becoming increasingly important in this response as it spreads out (inaudible). Be glad to answer any questions you may have for me at that point. Just to summarize where we’re at on this Friday regarding people—about 25,000 are on the ground down there. This has become the largest oil spill response in our nation’s history.

National Steel and Shipbuilding Company (NASSCO, www.nassco.com), a wholly owned subsidiary of General Dynamics, has joined BP p.l.c. in naming the Alaskan Explorer, the second of four Alaska-class double-hull oil tankers being built for BP Oil Shipping Company, USA. Maureen Hayward, spouse of Tony Hayward, Group Chief Executive of Exploration and Production for BP, was the ship's sponsor, officially naming the Alaskan Explorer and striking a ceremonial bottle of champagne across the ship's hull.