Bob Dudley was at the end of his tether. The embattled chief executive of TNK-BP, BP’s Russian joint venture, could no longer do his job effectively. Suspicious that his office had been bugged and his landline tapped, the Mississippi-born oil man resorted to stepping out on the balcony to make phone calls. He began to have his office regularly swept for bugs.

Relations at the top of Russia’s third-largest oil-and-gas group had disintegrated into all-out civil war. The breakdown between its owners, BP and four Russian billionaires, was so severe that managing the day-to-day operations had become virtually impossible. So Dudley rang BP’s headquarters in London last Thursday to tell Tony Hayward, BP’s chief executive, that he was leaving Russia. Dudley said he could retain operational control of TNK-BP, but others are doubtful.


His departure was not a total surprise. Dudley had just five days before a temporary visa expired, but there had been hope that he would be able to get a new one. Instead, he booked a flight for that evening, destined for a location that BP has kept under wraps. Putting in motion an operation that had been weeks in planning, executives at TNK-BP immediately began pulling together a team that would be flown out to support Dudley. He will now attempt to run TNK-BP, a company with a workforce of more than 66,000, almost all Russians, from a secret location.

BP chairman Peter Sutherland told The Sunday Times: “He is not in a BP office or in our headquarters in London as has been suggested. I’m not going to say where he is but I don’t think he is under any physical threat.”

Dudley’s sudden departure, which BP waited to announce until he was airborne, was designed to shock its disgruntled partners at AAR, the consortium owned by Mikhail Fridman, Leonard Blavatnik, German Khan and Viktor Vekselberg that controls the other half of TNK-BP. BP was drawing a line in the sand. “Up to now we have played by the Queensberry rules and as a consequence we have been outfoxed,” said a BP insider. “That will no longer be the case.”