Heavey to chair last Tullow meeting as successor named
AIDAN Heavey will chair his last board meeting at Tullow Oil in July, before departing the company he founded 33 years ago.
Tullow, which primarily focuses its oil production and exploration activities in Africa, has named Dorothy Thompson as Mr Heavey’s successor. She’ll formally join the Tullow board following the group’s annual general meeting next week and will assume the chairwomanship at the conclusion of the July board meeting.
For 12 years, until the end of 2017, Ms Thompson served as chief executive of Drax, a power and energy trading company.
She is also a non-executive director at the Bank of England, and a non-executive director of NYSE-listed Eaton Corporation, a power management solutions giant that has its corporate headquarters in Dublin.
Mr Heavey relinquished his role as Tullow chief executive last year, handing the reins over to Paul McDade. Mr Heavey took on the non-executive chairmanship, with the company indicating he would stay in that role for no more than two years.
Yesterday, Mr Heavey welcomed Ms Thompson’s appointment, as did Mr McDade.
“While Tullow is well-positioned with a balanced set of production, development and exploration assets, we will need to ensure that the company not only delivers on the potential of its current assets, but also seeks out new opportunities for growth,” said Mr McDade.
Ms Thompson said Tullow had made “significant progress” over the past two years as it emerged from the fallout of a slump in oil prices, which forced it and other oil companies to engage in radical restructuring that included job cuts.
Tullow expects production from its assets to be between 86,000 and 95,000 barrels of oil equivalent a day this year.
It also made a profit last year – its first in three years.
A Roscommon native, Mr Heavey (65) was once an accountant with Aer Lingus. He founded Tullow to exploit opportunities at small oil fields considered uneconomic for majors. He sold his collection of vintage cars and mortgaged his home to raise £1m (€1.27m) and initially targeted assets in Senegal, in west Africa.