Hayward tells BBC that BP was making it up day-to-day
TEXT OF STORY
BOB MOON: BP’s former boss is admitted his company was unprepared to deal with the scale of the spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Tony Hayward has been speaking to the BBC about the events earlier this year. Just last night the Obama administration’s inquiry into the causes of April’s environmental disaster found no evidence that BP or its partners cut corners to save money.
From London, the BBC’s Rebecca Singer has more.
REBECCA SINGER: Tony Hayward stepped down as Chief Executive as BP at the end of September. But he’s given the BBC a frank account of events during the Gulf oil spill. He says BP were making it up day-to-day. And argues what was going on was some extraordinary engineering. But when it was played out in the full glare of the media, it looked like fumbling and incompetence.
TONY HAYWARD: We tried to being open and transparent, we gave access to the operation. But the reality is we were completely overrun. And just not prepared to deal with the intensity of the media scrutiny.
During the crisis BP shares fell by as much as 50 percent. And Hayword told the BBC that at one point it was unable to borrow money from the credit markets. BP lost more than $17 billion in the quarter coinciding with the Gulf spill, but last quarter the company announced it returned to making a profit.
In London, I’m the BBC’s Rebecca Singer, for Marketplace.
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