People & Places

Somewhere along the way StoryWorth proposed a title like this as the theme for a story. For a while I thought there wasn’t enough to be bothered with. Then one day I decided to list the people I met who would have been somewhat publicly known.

Here’s the list, in no particular order: Sheikh Zayed, Ruler of Abu Dhabi Mikhail Gorbachev Bill Clinton Nursultan Nazarbayev. (President of Kazakhstan) Olusegun Obasanjo (President of Nigeria) Teodoro Obiang (President of Equatorial Guinea).

Muammar al-Qaddafi (Ruler of Libya) Abdelaziz Bouteflika (President of Algeria) Ilham Aliyev (President of Azerbaijan) Donald Trump (NY Real Estate Developer) Hugo Chavez (Venezuela) Malcolm Rifkind (UK Foreign Secretary) William Hague (UK Tory Party Leader) Deval Patrick (Governor of Massachusetts) Edwin Edwards (Governor of Louisiana) Russian Oligarchs (Many) Hun Sen (Tyrant of Cambodia) Asif Ali Zardari (Pakistani President & Crook) Sheikh Zayed, Ruler of Abu Dhabi was by all accounts a wise leader. When I went to Abu Dhabi, in 1970, the country had very few expatriates (as in, maybe 100?).

The ruler had a majlis once a week where his tribesmen could go and petition him in person. The country was still quite poor. It was in the process of uniting with the other Emirates to form the UAE in December 1971. And oil prices wouldn’t increase significantly until 1973.

Some of the highlights in those early years were when the Arabs came in from the desert to celebrate one or the other of the Eids (Feasts). One of the celebratory events was camel racing. At one such, a few of us were in the rickety stands to watch. Lo and behold, we were asked to approach the ruler and to shake hands.

I accompanied the Chairman of Mobil to a meeting in Moscow in 1990.Not sure why we were there, but other similar business leaders had been invited by Gorbachev to come and offer suggestions as to how the Soviet Union could transition to a market economy. I remember the visiting group included the head of Mars Chocolates, the head of ABB and other similar luminaries. The meeting was in a great big ‘palace’ in the center of Moscow. We also slept in the same facility. We got to shake hands with Gorbachev, who smiled a lot and seemed very personable.

Around 1991 I made a scouting trip around Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan seeing if there were oil and gas opportunities to be negotiated. One of the more interesting towns was Samarkand, where Timur’s tomb had been identified. The times were really strange. The Communist authorities in each place we visited put on welcoming ceremonies (think—way too much vodka) and wished to have some sort of signed agreement from us. The competition to get a deal in Kazakhstan was fierce. The authorities were offering large exploration tracts in the Caspian.

Somehow I persuaded them to give Mobil a block. We were the only American company to manage this. On the back of this I met Nazarbayev a number of times (him asking: Can I please have some money to buy fuel for my aircraft to fly to Europe?!) Later, when I was working for Texaco I met him again frequently in the context of some really bad properties we were working on onshore Kazakhstan. He liked the fact that we were providing employment for local people!

Mobil and Texaco were big producers offshore Nigeria. While I was running E&P, Texaco made a big new oil discovery after which Obasanjo told me he wanted to see me every 6 months!

Two of those were memorable. Like, two days before Christmas he summoned me to Lagos for a meeting. It was in the inner sanctum with lots of peacocks wandering about. Later on, while I was working for Hess, through a “Fixer”, he wanted some sort of deal with us (Hess) as front company for acquiring newly opened acreage in the waters of São Tomé. No dice; but it messed up my Christmas. At the opposite end of the spectrum was the VIP invitation to his inauguration as President. Unfortunately the plane booked to take us from Lagos to Abuja (the new Federal Capital) failed to start! By the time we secured an alternative aircraft which landed about 100 miles from the ceremony and then having driven there, the palace was surrounded by a milling throng and there was no getting through. Another missed ceremony!

Don’t know what his title was, but the country was something like “Jamahiriya of Libya”? I hated him ever since I got thrown out of Libya when he had his coup in 1969. Then, sometime in the early 2000s, for some reason the oil companies who had previously worked there were invited back to Libya! Hess had some interests, so I got to go back. I met the Great Leader in a magnificent tent in the heart of Tripoli, where his armed guards were Amazonian, heavily armed female guards. But this bizarre meeting was not the highlight of the visit. We had a meeting with the chiefs of the National Oil Company. It was held in the old Mobil Oil Libya office building which I had last seen 30 years previously. Imagine my astonishment when I found that not a single item had changed, not a tile from a loo, not a desk from an office. Had I carved my name on a desk it would still have been there.

Without a doubt, he guides the most murderous, corrupt authoritarian government in Africa, and in that context that’s saying something. He came to power via a coup against his uncle, the then president. Uncle was then shot by firing squad (imported from Morocco).

Hess had acquired its position in EG just weeks before I joined.

Because Hess overpaid for the position it threatened to bankrupt the company and left me with many sleepless nights until I got it straightened out. However, even though Obiang was an evil monster, he did provide me with a giggle. Every Christmastime Hess produces a kids’ toy with flashing lights, horns etc. On one occasion we were visiting Obiang in his Spanish/Moorish palace.

We were barely inside the reception area shaking hands with Obiang when John Hess said to the President, “Mr. President, I have a present for you. It’s a helicopter”. As John is fiddling to open a package in his hands, Obiang says “Oh good. How many passengers does it take?” Just then John H opens the toy box and puts his gift on the palace floor and switches it on….its a toy helicopter! The look on Obiang’s face was priceless, except for the fact that he looked like he could have put us in front of a firing squad. I had to stop myself from laughing out loud.

Another authoritarian leader from an ex-Communist state.

Again, John Hess and I went to visit an uninteresting dictator in his palace, this time in Baku on the Caspian Sea. This time though there were no smiles. This guy was totally uninterested in us. We met in a long room with a table that resembled the long one that Putin now uses to greet visitors. Aliev was on one side and John Hess and I were on the other. Again the same patter: “I have a present for you.” No response of interest. John opens the toy box and takes out a “windy-uppy” car, which has to be pulled back to power up. Then he lets it go and it shoots off down this big table and falls off the end. Wow, big happy smile on Aliyev’s face and for a while, these two billionaires entertain each other by racing the toy car up and down the table!

Abdelazziz Bouteflika, President of Algeria Although still only in his 60s when John Hess and I met him in Algiers, he looked tired and worn out. But he spent an hour telling us why Morocco’s occupation of Spanish Sahara was such a bad thing. He wanted us to intercede with the US government on behalf of the Polisario Front, which Algeria supported. He actually sat in a type of throne chair and spoke essentially for an hour without the benefit of notes or any assistants. Impressive.

The other aspect of this meeting was the stark contrast with my previous visit. That time I had a four-person ex-SAS unit, heavily armed, as a tight escort. Evidently, Algerian domestic politics had changed for the better (?) in the interim!

Bill Clinton, ex-President of the USA In 1998, after coming back from Australia and starting work for Texaco in White Plains, NY but before getting settled in NY, I commuted between NY and Washington, DC. I flew down to DC on Friday afternoon and then came back on Sunday night. I had been doing the NY to DC flight often enough so that each week I automatically booked seat 1A beside the door on the “puddle-jumper” which was the aircraft. Anyway, one Friday I was on board and in my seat. An SUV drove up and these guys in suits started loading bags and golf clubs onto the plane. Next thing one of these besuited guys with something in his ear came to me and said “Can you get out of the seat?” I said “NO”. At that moment, Clinton came on board and said “Oh, leave him alone”.

He sat across the narrow aisle in seat 1B and the security detail sat behind. He was very personable and chatted with me on easy topics for most of the flight.

John Hess and I were entertaining a business exec from Canada in Le Cirque restaurant in Manhattan around 2002. There were a couple of male diners at the next table. One leaned over and asked John how business was. John introduced us to the intruder.

“This is Donald Trump”. His table left shortly thereafter and John, the soul of diplomacy, never said a word, but he made it clear that Trump was not an accepted member of the New York business elite.

Malcolm Rifkind, former Foreign Secretary of the UK. After Labour defeated the Tories in 1997 the unseated MP needed to earn a crust. Somebody working for me in Melbourne suggested to me that it might be useful to have a person such as an ex-Foreign Secretary with all his global political contacts on the BHP Petroleum payroll. It wasn’t a hugely persuasive argument but I said I was willing to interview the candidate. And so I ended up in the Savoy Hotel in London interviewing Malcolm Rifkind to see if he was suitable for me to hire him!

All I could think about as I conducted the perfunctory interview was how my mother would have greatly enjoyed the idea of her Republican son questioning a high Tory! I did hire him. He came to Australia from time to time. He didn’t add much value, but gave some good speeches.

William Hague (Baron Hague of Richmond) ex-Leader of the U.K. Tories I spent an excruciating evening sitting beside him at a table for four during some sort of large celebratory dinner that BHP was hosting in London. His business experience seemed to come from working for one of the international consultancies (McKinsey) very briefly. He spent most of the evening quizzing me about what my career path had been like and how it was to be CEO of an oil company. He struck me as being very “soft”, even harmless.

I visited Chavez in his palace in Caracas in the early 2000s. I had visited Caracas on a number of previous occasions, although under the previous democratic regime. Now we were the guests of the strongman. Chavez was surprising on a number of counts.

He was physically big; he had an infectious smile, and was very charming. He was a big baseball fan, so we had brought him a gift of a baseball signed by a famous player. He was absolutely delighted by this. We had been sitting around for a good hour chatting and drinking coffee when we heard the sounds of a kerfuffle from outside the palace. The meeting abruptly ended and we were escorted out by a side entrance. We rounded a corner onto the main plaza that fronted the palace. There was a very large mob of people attempting to charge the palace while being held back by the riot police, who were making liberal use of tear gas to control the mob. And that was the last meeting I had in Caracas.

There were other similar interactions with, for example Vladimir Potanin (by far the richest Russian oligarch) and John Browne, former CEO of BP, who was fired for lying to a Judge about his homosexual activities. But you get the picture. It’s hard to know though, whether any of this “glad-handing” contributed any value whatsoever. Still, it did make for some interesting insights for me!