“Are you asking me as majority shareholder or as head of government?”
On Sunday, October 21, 1973, the president of the oil company BP, Eric Drake, received at his summer residence in Checkers by Edward Heath, put the British Prime Minister up against the wall.
Certainly, the government holds, since the decision of a certain Churchill in 1914, 51% of the capital of BP.
But does this give him the right, in the aftermath of the first oil crisis, to demand that the company reserve its crude in the United Kingdom as a priority, even if it means exposing it to retaliatory measures from other client countries?
Drake summarizes the dilemma to his interlocutor: if it is the shareholder of BP who asks him, then he takes the risk of being sued by injured minority shareholders;
if it is the government that asks BP, then it will have to be written in black and white, in the law.
This kind of conversations, how many Jean-Bernard Lévy has had in the nearly eight years he has been…
This article is for subscribers only.
You have 77% left to discover.
Cultivating your freedom is cultivating your curiosity.
Keep reading your article for €0.99 for the first month
I ENJOY IT
Already subscribed?
Login