Hayward's likely successor at BP is managing director Bob Dudley, an American who has been overseeing the spill response since June, said the report.
Hayward was called back to London a month [image-nocss] ago after a bruising encounter with a Congressional committee and has since kept a low profile.
"We're getting to the end of the situation," David Battersby at Redmayne Bentley Stockbrokers told the news agency. "To draw a line under it, they need a new chief executive."
The BP board would have to approve a change in company leadership, and there is persistent speculation that chairman Karl-Henric Svanberg, who moved into the post on January 1, is also likely to lose his job later this year, said AP.
Dudley, who succeeded Hayward as BP's point man in dealing with the oil spill effort, was in London Monday with other board members.
A U.S. government official also told AP on condition of anonymity that Hayward was on his way out as CEO.
"BP notes the press speculation over the weekend regarding potential changes to management and the charge for the costs of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. BP confirms that no final decision has been made on these matters," the company said in a statement Monday to the London Stock Exchange before trading began.
Hayward, 53, who has a Ph.D. in geology, had been a well-regarded CEO, said the report. But his promise when he took the job in 2007 to focus on safety "like a laser" came back to haunt him after an April 20 explosion on the Deepwater Horizon rig killed 11 workers and unleashed a deep-sea gusher of oil.
Hayward's early attempts to shift blame to the rig operator, Transocean, failed to take the heat off BP. Later remarks that the amount of oil pouring into the Gulf was "tiny" compared to its volume of water, and Hayward's whining that he would "like [his] life back" made him an object of scorn. That emotion turned to fury when Gulf residents heard that Hayward spent a day at a fancy English sailing race in which his yacht was competing at the height of the disaster.
David Cumming, head of U.K. equities at Standard Life Investments, told BBC Radio that the board's reported intention to remove Hayward is an act of "political appeasement." He added, "I think they have taken view that his departure will relieve some of the political and media pressure in the U.S. and help BP rebuild its U.S. reputation."
Dudley has so far avoided any gaffes, the report said. Currently BP's managing director, Dudley grew up partly in Hattiesburg, Miss. He spent 20 years at Amoco Corp., which merged with BP in 1998, and lost out to Hayward on the CEO's slot three years ago.
Click hereto view Hayward's biography.
And click hereto view Dudley's biography.
BP said the cost of dealing with the spill had reached nearly $4 billion by July 19, but that it was too early to quantify the eventual total cost.
BP is the process of selling assets to raise $10 billion toward a $20 billion fund that will finance the cleanup of the mess in the Gulf. BP announced last week that it had sold properties in the United States, Canada and Egypt to Apache Corp. for $7 billion. Under pressure from President Barack Obama, BP has also announced that it will pay no more dividends to shareholders this year. That move disappointed some 18 million Britons, many of them retirees, who hold stock in what used to be the country's largest company.
(Click here for previous CSP Daily News coverage of BP and the oil spill.)
BP is no stranger to scandal. In early 2007, then-CEO Lord John Brownethe driver behind the company's "Beyond Petroleum" green initiativeresigned following revelations about his private life and misuse of company resources. (Click here for previous coverage.)
London-based BP is one of the world's largest energy companies with operations in more than 100 countries across six continents. The company's main businesses are exploration and production of oil and gas; refining, manufacturing and marketing of oil products and petrochemicals; transportation and marketing of natural gas; and a growing business in renewable and low-carbon power and next-generation energy technologies. BP markets more than 15 billion gallons of gasoline every year to U.S. consumers through 13,000 BP, ampm and other retail outlets. It is the single, global brand formed by the combination of the former British Petroleum, Amoco, Atlantic Richfield (ARCO), ARAL and Burmah Castrol.
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