Peter Sutherland
Irish lawyer and businessman who was the first director-general of the World Trade Organisation
PETER SUTHERLAND, who has died aged 71, was a combative Irish lawyer and former Attorney General of Ireland who became a European Commissioner and the first director-general of the World Trade Organisation, before making a successful business career as chairman of BP and Goldman Sachs International.
Sutherland was probably best known in Britain for his role in the sometimes turbulent affairs of BP, but his own assessment of his achievements placed his wideranging work in the international public arena well ahead of his boardroom battle honours. In both spheres he was known for a formidable combination of tenacity and charm – and a hint of menace, delivered with a twinkling eye. In later years he was a furious critic both of the British decision to leave the EU and of the way in which British ministers were approaching the negotiation.
In the chair at BP from 1997, Sutherland worked in tandem with a high-profile chief executive, Lord Browne of Madingley, during a period of rapid expansion which included merger with three other international oil companies, Amoco, Arco and Burmah-castrol to create a global giant of the industry. Sutherland made plain that he was happy for Browne to take the limelight and that he saw his own job strictly behind the scenes, running the board; but when a row blew up over the end-date of Browne’s tenure (eventually foreshortened by complications in his private life) Sutherland took a more muscular public role.
He took a similarly direct hand in the resolution of a stand-off with powerful local investors in a Russian joint venture, TNK-BP. Having long indicated his own intention to retire from BP to allow more time for other commitments, Sutherland had to remain in post until December 2009 until a successor – Carlhenric Svanberg from Ericsson, the Swedish telecoms firm – could be recruited.
Among Sutherland’s passions outside business was the cause of European integration, which he called a “noble political ideal”. In 1995 he had been due to succeed Jacques Delors as president of the European Commission until a new government in Dublin blocked the appointment; in later years he campaigned vigorously for Irish acceptance of the Lisbon treaty.
Sutherland was also a special representative of the UN secretary general on migration issues, an honorary ambassador of the United Nations Industrial Development Organisation, a financial adviser to the Vatican (as “Consultor of the Extraordinary Section of the Administration of the Patrimony of the Apostolic See”) and chairman of the London School of Economics.
He once told an interviewer the secret of maintaining such a wide portfolio of interests yet making an impact in everything he undertook. It was he said, something his father had taught him as a boy: “If the ball is at your foot, he told me, kick it. Most of my life has been spent finding balls at my feet. And I’ve never been reluctant to give them a kick.”
Sutherland’s anger over Brexit was heartfelt: it offended both his pro-european ideals and his instincts as one of the world’s most experienced trade negotiators. “The insanity of Brexit is evident to all but the most obtuse” was one of his public sallies; in private he really let rip, most especially in response to suggestions from London, as negotiations began, that the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic was a minor obstacle that would be easily solved. It was after a raging speech on these themes in early 2017 that he was taken seriously ill.
The son of a Dublin insurance broker, Peter Denis Sutherland was born on April 25 1946 and was educated by Jesuits at Gonzaga College. He went on to study law at University College Dublin, where he captained the rugby team at prop forward – a position he also occupied for several seasons for the Lansdowne club.
He was called to the Bar at Dublin’s Kings Inns in 1969 (later also qualifying as a US attorney) and made his name in run-of-themill criminal work – “I would have been happy as a Rumpole figure, I loved impressing a jury,” he once said – until 1981, when at 35 he became Ireland’s youngest ever Attorney General, serving in two Fine Gael governments led by Garret Fitzgerald.
Three years later he was nominated to go to Brussels as a member of Jacques Delors’ first commission. Again he was notably young for the job. He was responsible for competition issues, and also successively for relations with the European parliament and for social affairs and education – counting as one of his best achievements the establishment of the Erasmus exchange programme, which has enabled more than two million young people to study at universities outside their home countries.
Back in Dublin at the end of his five-year term in Brussels, Sutherland returned briefly to the bar until he was asked to become chairman of Allied Irish Banks – despite the fact that he had never previously attended a corporate board meeting. Other directorships followed, including BP, where he had first made an impression when he slapped an EU fine on the company for infringements of competition rules.
In 1993 he accepted an invitation to return to the international scene as directorgeneral of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (Gatt), a Geneva-based forum for global negotiations that seemed to many observers impossibly fractious and bogged down. Friends told Sutherland he was mad to take the job on, but by sheer force of personality he turned it into a triumph, bringing the “Uruguay round” of talks to a conclusion and presiding over the creation on January 1 1995, of the World Trade Organisation as Gatt’s successor.
Shortly afterwards – the Brussels commission presidency having been snatched from his grasp – Sutherland moved to London to become non-executive chairman of Goldman Sachs International, the European arm of the New York investment bank. He also rejoined the BP board as deputy chairman; and when the then chairman, David Simon, left to become a minister in Tony Blair’s first administration, Sutherland succeeded him. Having joined the Goldman partnership, Sutherland became a rich man – his fortune was later estimated at more than £150million – as a result of its flotation in 1999.
Though a superb high-level contacts man and a challenging strategic thinker for the firm, he was never a red-blooded capitalist of the kind more usually associated with the Goldman milieu, regarding his unexpected wealth as a cushion which freed him to devote large parts of his time and energy to public service. He gave generously to chosen causes – including 4 million euros to University College Dublin to build a new law school.
He was also a non-executive director of Royal Bank of Scotland at the time of its near collapse, and held numerous other directorships and public appointments, including the chair of governors of the European Institute of Public Administration and the European chairmanship of the Trilateral Commission, a body founded to foster closer cooperation between Europe, the US and Japan.
In later years, Sutherland divided his time between homes and offices in London and Dublin – where he remained a highly influential figure, and was sometimes tipped for high office. Despite long absences, “most people think I’m still there,” he observed, and perhaps more significantly, “Ireland will always be big enough for me.”
A tireless traveller, reliant for communication on nothing more hi-tech than an elderly mobile phone, Sutherland also kept teams of staff engaged on his UN work in Geneva and New York. He took holidays in Spain, his wife’s native country, and retained a passion for sport, never losing the bullnecked physique of the prop forward of his youth. Nor did he lose the willingness to go for a hard tackle, as one West End mugger found to his surprise and cost.
Peter Sutherland was appointed honorary KCMG in 2004, and was also honoured in Ireland and several other European countries. He is survived by his wife Maruja and their three children.