November 13th, 2007
front-row forward who never loses a fight, The
Of the Australian tycoon Alan Bond it used sometimes to be remarked that, after a nuclear war, there would be only three things left alive: seaweed, cockroaches and Bond. In British business these days, there is probably only one man with the same kind of durability: Peter Sutherland, chairman of BP. The recent warfare at the top of the giant oil company, which led to the early departure of its muchadmired chief executive Lord Browne, might not have been nuclear. But it was noticeable that after the dust had cleared, Sutherland was still in his job and Browne wasn’t.
To anyone who knows him, that was no surprise. Sutherland has one of the toughest skins in global business. Through a series of big jobs — in politics, trade, finance and industry — the bluff Irishman has sailed from one triumph to the next. A lawyer by training, he has arguably the world’s most impressive CV. As well as heading BP, he is chairman of Goldman Sachs International, set up and ran the World Trade Organisation, and is a former European commissioner.
Despite such eminence, he has remained, at least so far as the British media are concerned, a largely background figure. ‘The role of the chairman is not to be the public face of the company, ‘ he has said. ‘I’m not a driven chairman, I look to find a consensus.’ Maybe so, but he’s not shy of combat either: once a prop-forward in top-level Irish rugby, he has been known to flatten a West End mugger.
Born into a relatively modest Dublin family, he was educated at University College and qualified as a barrister, appearing in such famous cases as the one in which Charles Haughey stood accused of illegal arms dealing. ‘I never planned to be anything other than a practising barrister in Ireland, ‘ he says.
But his real talent turned out to be working the space between politics and business.
Those who meet Sutherland find him charming, amusing and intellectually challenging in equal measure. A thread of steel runs through his hearty demeanour. He talks in long, perfectly composed paragraphs, and has already understood and dealt with any possible counter-arguments before they’re raised.
Opponents tend to come off worse, even if they might not realise how it happened.
He got his first big break when Garret FitzGerald appointed him Ireland’s attorneygeneral in 1981, when he was just 35. Next stop, Brussels: in 1985, he became Ireland’s EU commissioner and struck up a close relationship with the high priest of integration, the French EU president Jacques Delors.
Sutherland took charge of competition policy, one of the few posts in Brussels with any real clout. He was even briefly touted as a possible successor to Delors — who was said to favour the idea — and the British briefly supported him for the job, presumably on the grounds that it would be nice to have someone who spoke English as their first language.
That one got away, and Sutherland does not hide the fact that he hankered after it: ‘I relished my roles in public service and would have loved to have been the President of the European Commission. I would have been prepared to give up any other career or business interest to do that. It is the noblest political movement of the modern era.’ Disappointment did not hold him back. On leaving Brussels he took up the chairmanship of Allied Irish Bank. Again, the timing was good: the rapid expansion of the Irish economy made it very difficult for any bank with a franchise in that country not to make money.
And he was far from finished in the international arena: next he took over the running of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, presiding over the Uruguay agreement which significantly opened up global trade. When Gatt was transformed into the World Trade Organisation, Sutherland became its first director-general. The WTO has been a force behind the rapid rise of globalisation: it’s not the only reason our houses are full of cheap Chinese-made goods but it’s certainly one of them. Turning Gatt into the WTO was a major success, and Sutherland remains one of the few people on the world stage with the patience to try to inch trade negotiations forward. It is, without question, his most striking achievement.
Not his most lucrative, however. On leaving WTO he levered himself up to the summit of global capitalism. Goldman Sachs invited him to chair its London-based international arm — opening doors, soothing egos and networking ferociously. The timing was, as ever, immaculate. Not only was he slotting himself into Goldman when the firm was embarking on a decade-long run of unbroken success, he also stepped in just as it transformed itself from a partnership to a limited company. Along the way he collected a reported £125 million in Goldman shares — not bad for someone who claims not to know much about investment banking.
Yet it is probably at BP that he has made the more lasting impact, chairing the company through much of Lord Browne’s long but sometimes turbulent reign. Browne made a pair of big strategic bets at BP: that oil was too cheap in the late 1990s, making it a great time to buy your rivals; and that Russia was the most important source of new oil.