You may be onto something—with minor plastic surgery and a good hairstylist, I think Cox could pull it off. Alternatively, he could skip the image makeover and simply be a stand-in on BP’s conference calls. His answers wouldn’t make any less sense than Hayward’s :- )
›BP Will Suspend Dividend and Set Aside $20B for Claims
By JONATHAN WEISMAN , JARED A. FAVOLE and MONICA LANGLEY JUNE 16, 2010, 4:13 P.M. ET
WASHINGTON—President Barack Obama, after emerging from a meeting with top BP PLC executives, said the company will put $20 billion into an independently administered fund to help pay for claims as a result of the Gulf oil disaster.
BP Chairman Carl-Henric Svanberg said after the meeting that the company wouldn't pay further dividends this year and will look after the people of the Gulf coast. He said he wanted to apologize to those affected by an oil disaster he acknowledged should have never happened. He said the company would do its own probe of what caused the catastrophe.
Mr. Obama called the meeting "constructive" and said BP voluntarily agreed to set aside an additional $100 million for workers who lost their jobs as a result of a deep-water drilling moratorium.
Mr. Obama said the $20 billion is not a cap, and added that BP will pay the full costs of the cleanup including environmental damage.
The president met with executives of BP, including its chairman and Chief Executive Tony Hayward, for several hours at the White House Wednesday morning. [Was it Hayward, or Geoff Cox?] Mr. Obama said "BP is a strong and viable company and it is in all of our interests that it remains so."
The fund would be overseen by Kenneth Feinberg. Mr. Feinberg has taken on a series of high-profile arbitration cases during his legal career. He is currently the U.S. government's pay czar, a role in which he butted heads with financial executives over their pay packages under the financial-industry rescue plan in 2009. He also oversaw the federal government's compensation fund for victims of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.
BP shares have lost roughly half their value since the spill began on April 20, and investor concerns about the oil giant have intensified in recent days as the Obama administration has escalated its demands for compensation.
Mr. Obama has come under increasing political pressure from residents and political leaders in the region who say the federal response to the spill has been slow and disorganized, and that BP has been too slow to pay damage claims.
Mr. Obama toured the region for the fourth time Monday and Tuesday, and heard complaints from officials in Alabama, Mississippi and Florida.
Mr. Obama said in his speech Tuesday evening that he wanted BP to fund efforts to restore the Gulf coast after the spill, and appointed Navy Secretary Ray Mabus to lead a long-term Gulf Coast restoration effort.
The Gulf oil spill, which began after a huge deepwater oil rig leased by BP exploded April 20, is now estimated to be spilling up to 60,000 barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico every day.
Mr. Obama has called the spill the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history. Cleanup and restoration efforts in environmentally sensitive coastal wetlands and fisheries in could take months or years. The threat that oil could foul tourist beaches along the Gulf Coast has dented the tourist industry in the region.
The Obama administration is conducting civil and criminal investigations of the causes of the spill and BP's response. Congress is conducting multiple probes and is expected to debate legislation to institute stricter regulation of the offshore-drilling industry.‹
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