BP sells $7bn worth of assets amid talk Hayward to stand down

Good for BP.

I don't think that anyone should resign for what happened. Judging by how vitriolic the US government have bee, it smacks of skulduggery on their part. Read what you wish into that statement.

The US will do anything to secure energy supplies for their own, and maintain superpower status, even at the expense of their allies. Trying to get BP taken over by a US company has been nore more than an attempt to enter Iraq (see Rumaila) and Vietnam via stealth where it would otherwise be frowned upon to be seen to be benefitting direct from the spoils of war.

Shame on Obama all the way.

Mr Hayward should not stand down. Under the circumstances and the continuous bashing by US administration, he has done well. He was under great pressure and one can understandably allow the very few mistakes he has done.

Oh dear, the dreaded "S" word (strategic!).

It has always seemed to me to be the corporate equivalent of the King's Magic Suit of Clothes (A Fool would say he was naked but a wise man would say he was "strategic").

For an oilman Tony Hayward looks a nice guy, but a string of H & S procedure violations and a BOP that failed in all four ways says there were serious safety problems inside BP, and both the CEO, and the chairman, ultimately own the responsibility for it.

If they had been more assertive about communicating this, firstly this mess might not have happened, and if it then did, the people who caused it would have been identified and removed very quickly, but Tony Hayward's position would be undiminished.

Is it true that very few of those damaged by Exxon Valdes have yet received compensation????

To all those who continue to throw nationlist statements around in defense of BP, I have one thing to say: BP Texas City Explosion.

Scalps, that's what the American public want. Hayward is a pawn to be sacrificed in the shareholders' interest - he knows it, All part of the PR process... Obama gets his man and keeps a few voters, big oil business returns to normal. Such is the cycle of things. To keep him and risk market outrage would increase the likelyhood of complications. Good PR is a big deal now.

The flawed safety argument is probably a real one. Industry wide too I imagine.

With "special" friends like America, who needs enemies.

The USA led the UK into the futile Iraq venture to secure its oil reserves and now sees the 'rape' of BP in the same light. Oil and defence interests run the US Govt and BP is at their political mercy.

Russell and an elder one have it right. When this affair broke I was neutral on the issue. As events unfolded one could see that there appeared to be some evidence of shortcuts being taken by BP, but the there had been no real analysis of this by independent judges.Then all of a sudden the "Britishness" of this venture is being trumpeted by the US president, when the reality is that BP is a multinational, 50% owned (broadly) by US investors and others. This was really shortsighted. The track record of one US company in India was appalling. Multinationals have raped Nigeria without a qualm. Many Canadians feel let down, post the Exxon Valdez disaster. The contemplated oil shale explorations in Alsaka are a disgrace. Comments like President Obama's remind Brits that it was Donald Rumsfeld who swept the carefully crafted plans of Colin Powell and others for dealing with post invasion Iraq onto the floor, at huge cost to us, the Iraqi's and the US military. The US should not treat its allies in this way, especially when they have gone to bat for the US in recent years in the way we have done.

I think the Megrahi affair has an even greater capacity to harm BP (to some extent justifiably, perhaps) since it is not amenable to a cap being put on the thing. Mr Cameron should proceed very carefully on that front.

comment on chris clarkes'. If the top dogs of a company should always take the flak, whatever happened to Bush Jnr, and Blair for whose mistakes the youth of the USA and the UK are still paying for and for what - the same black stuff that BP is being vilified for!!

Russell is right that the US public demands scalps. The question is whether taking Hayward's scalp when he was trying to improve engineering/safety procedures (He wasn't in post when Texas went up.) and replacing it with a new scalp who can talk a better game is really the best move for the planet. Sadly it may be the best move for shareholders.

One reads that some of the oil escaping from those oily, gaseus substrates in the Gulf of Mexico are natural occurrences; one imagines that with all that weight of water pressing down, the stuff will find weak spots in the overlaying mantle. One of these days the volcanic activity under Yelowstone will blow of its own volition, whom will they blame then one wonders.

The only obvious mistake that Hayward made was not to send a PR man in his place, or at least have accompany him into the lion's den and field the questions there. However I fear that for the sake of BP he must stand down, all the waffle about possible health and safety infringements, notwithstanding. The judgement of risk in human activity is ever a calculation, viewed in different measure by different people; the extreme judgements taken by some today to avoid the possibilities of litigation could mean its not safe to get out bed, of mornings; though that of course is a hazard of itself.

No, I think BP is an excellent engineering outfit who make serious judgements on the matter of risk; the problem is that not all parties in disputes use the same parameters, Perhaps BP being big were thus somewhat arrogant in their interpretation of safety factors and conduct, that does not mean that they ignored safety. All of engineering activity is a calculation - there are no certainties - and have to be proved out in practice, of which I don't suppose that there is much experience of drilling for oil in the conditions that prevail in the gulf.

No this whole business stinks of political expediency, commercial chicanery and bleeding hearts; for which BP would do well to update their PR departments and their role as Russell implies.

Here is where I differ with an elder one. If you are a very wealthy company developing oil and gas resources in very challenging circumstances surely you would take all possible precautions against failure precisely because fixing it, once its blown at the depths in question, is so difficult? The suggestion is that BP made decisions which limited the cost and number of the safety devices. If that is true then they are guilty of more than a lack of PR skills.

Hayward, we are right behind you, and stuff the yanks.

No, Timothy all sorts of suggestions will be made by those with a vested interest in finding BP at fault, and by the newsmedia who love a story of implied infamy based on nothing but anecdotes that serve their purpose - look how long these BP blogs have been running. As I said before, assessment of risk is a calculation, and yes, in the case of business it is ever a commercial balancing act, I would think that BP felt they had got it right, but one can never be absolutely sure; one can only be sure with hindsight. Arguably in a perfect world no one should be trying to drill for oil at those depths, but our needs for the black stuff overrides many notions of risk. Like most other people outside the oil industry I don't know if there is a rule book governing safety precautions for the specific conditions of this kind of operation, sure, there will be established standards, but an agreed set of rules that lawyers can set their teeth into, who knows, nonetheless the case for the prosecution seems already well established.

I cannot believe that BP were willfully negligent, they would know surely that too much was at stake. That is not to say that some person or persons at the work face were negligent or incompetent, that is more likely to be difficult to prove and it looks as though those vested interests are not interested in such an outcome in any case.

In Scotland we're disgusted at the remarks made in Washington this week. The president seems to think that there is some short term political capital to be made out of Megrahi. Does he not realise that there is a Scottish government and a Scottish Legal system, not answerable to Cameron or Westminster. The decision to allow this man to go home to die, was not forgiveness, it was compassion. I suspect that compassion is a concept that a vengeful society like America will not understand. Lets hope that England and Cameron don't become like America and Obama

If BP were cavalier with the safety of their rigs, refineries and pipelines, then I suspect that they would have had quite a number of incidents over the years around the globe. They have had 3 serious incidents, all in the USA, all since BP to over Amoco. I suspect that the gung-ho attitude is not the British influence, it is the American pile of crock they bought as a way into the lucrative American market. Rather cut the American bit loose, divest from the USA market and look to where the growth will be in the decades ahead; South America, the Indian sub-continent and China.

The Texas oil refinery and 'other' US accidents have generally been the result of poor engineering and lack of good maintance. Don't forget these were all Amoco or other US owned companies before BP took them over. BP have been trying for years to get these problems fixed. I know - I was sent to the US to inspect a refinery BP had just taken over - what a joke this place was !!. Plants in Polland and other '3rd' world countries were more advanced and safer than this thing. It takes many many years to restructure a refinery with massive investiment.

Personally I think its time for BP to pull out of the US - as someone said earlier if this is a special friendship I would hate to be the enemy !!