英国石油公司CEO下课

BP's Chief Executive is on his way out. Tony Hayward is the latest casualty of the biggest oil disaster in U.S. history. But Hayward is not leaving BP. He is to take a non-executive post in October. His replacement is U.S. Gulf coast native Robert Dudley. Let's get more now from London. Our Jim Baldwin is right outside BP headquarters. He joins us now. And Jim, Hayward is out after posting a record quarterly loss.

Well that's true, but it's not because of the quarterly loss. You've got to remember BP is a very profitable company and without the Gulf spill would have made a very nice profit this quarter as well. But they decided to take a more than 32 billion-dollar reserve, take that money and use that to help pay for the Gulf spill, and of course you will see inevitable lawsuits and fines and other things as well. So it's a very big quarterly loss. Sometimes companies like to lob all the bad news into one quarterly report and hope that they can draw a line under that and move on. So by replacing the CEO and putting in an American native in charge and by taking this huge quarterly loss, and announcing how much money they are going to put into the spill clean-up efforts, then maybe they'll be able to move on.

Oh, BP has a new CEO, announcing increased provisions, assets sales. Will all these mean a different better BP ahead?

Well, certainly a different BP. They will say, BP said this morning that they would plan to sell some $30 billion worth of assets over the next 18 months. That's a massive amount of assets. They've already announced 7 billion dollars. So now analysts are wondering what would they sell, where would they become a smaller company, would it be in Alaska? Would it be in South America? Would it be in North Atlantic? Would it be in Russia, probably not. But there will be a lot of speculation about that. The company says that of course it needs to rebuild its reputation. The outgoing CEO Tony Hayward came in with a promise to clean up its act when it comes to safety records and of course that obviously didn't work.