‘We’re going to leave a footprint’
As he retires, Chevron’s Alireza Moshiri’s legacy is deeper corporate involvement in peoples’ well-being
IN Iran, Alireza Moshiri wanted to be a professional tennis player. His father told him he wasn’t good enough.
So Moshiri moved to the U.S., got a degree in petroleum engineering and, over four decades at Chevron Corp., pushed the company to care more about the welfare of the countries in which it was drilling, arguing that what was good for the people there was good for Chevron, too. He built multimillion-dollar programs in Angola to fight sickle cell disease, in Colombia, to reduce mother and child death rates, and in the Niger Delta, to root out poverty and conflict.
“In our business, developing a long-term relationship with the community and the government and the people is essential,” said Moshiri, who is stationed in Houston. “When we go somewhere, we’re going to leave a footprint.”
Moshiri, 65, will retire at the end of the month under Chevron’s mandatory retirement policy, ending a 39-year career that pioneered groundbreaking international programs that put Chevron into partnership with foreign governments, development agencies, and nonprofit groups to address poverty, disease and other problems afflicting the developing world. He was at the vanguard of a new kind of corporate responsibility, one that demanded long-term commitments from Chevron and other U.S. corporations, rather than just handing out money or tackling one-off projects, like building schools.
Moshiri, for example, worked with Texas Children’s Hospital
“He said we can’t continue to invest in a country in the old way. It’s not good enough to build a school. We need to work with the government to become part of the social fabric.” Mamadou Beye, general manager for policy, government and public affairs at Chevron
to create a sickle cell disease screening program in the central African country of Angola, one of at least three on-going programs Chevron built with the hospital in developing countries over the past decade.
“All I can say is it had never happened to me before,” said Mark Kline, chief physician at Texas Children’s. “I had been working in global health for a decade before that. But we had never had support of this kind from an oil or gas entity. It was a first.”
Moshiri challenged Chevron, too, said Mamadou Beye, general manager for policy, government and public affairs.
“He said we can’t continue to invest in a country in the old way,” said Beye, who has known Moshiri for two decades and works under him. “It’s not good enough to build a school. We need to work with the government to become part of the social fabric.”
Education, not money
Moshiri was born and raised in a secular home in Tehran with two brothers and two sisters. His mother was one of the first female public school principals, his father an administrator in the country’s Department of Education. Moshiri and his siblings went to private school.
“I’m not going to leave you a dime,” his father told him. “All I’m going to leave you is an education.”
He came to the U.S. in 1972 and attended the University of Tulsa, where he got his bachelor’s degree and then his master’s in petroleum engineering in 1978.
Chevron hired Moshiri that year, before he had even left the university. He worked five years as a reservoir engineer and a drilling engineer, before moving through the ranks: Senior production engineer. Supervisor. Manager. General manager. Adviser to the vice chairman.
In 2001, Moshiri was appointed managing director of Chevron Latin America Exploration and Production Co., where he was responsible for production operations in Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, Trinidad & Tobago and Venezuela. In 2008, he added Africa.
It was largely then that he helped shift the way Chevron gives.
Sickle cell challenge
In 2009, Moshiri was attending a summit for African first ladies in Los Angeles. There, the wife of Angola’s president, Ana Paula dos Santos, presented a serious health problem in her nation, sickle cell disease. The two went to lunch; Moshiri asked her more.
Sickle cell is a genetic disorder in which red blood cells become irregularly shaped, get stuck in blood vessels, block blood flow and cause pain, infections, organ damage and stroke, among other things. It was killing thousands of children every year. Few were getting screened.
Chevron had been drilling in Angola since 1958. It had produced billions of barrels of oil off the country’s shores. But it had never taken on such a health challenge. And it learned that no other organization had tried to battle sickle cell disease among children in Africa.
“The solution was here, in Houston,” Moshiri said. He connected Angola with the Texas Children’s Center. “All we had to do was put them together. We’ve saved several thousand children.”
Chevron has now committed $9 million in support of the Angola Sickle Cell Initiative since its start in 2011. The program has screened more than 170,000 babies; more than 4,000 have been diagnosed with sickle cell and are receiving treatment.
Community support
Such programs aren’t just philanthropic, Moshiri said.
“To have a reliable operation, without any disruption, I need community support,” he said.
Companies hope such acts of altruism reduce tensions as they begin working in foreign lands. Supporting social programs can smooth relations with foreign governments, build respect among local communities and help snuff out security problems and unrest. In recent years, for example, the oil industry has been plagued by pipeline and refinery attacks by militants who often want more oil money to pass to local residents.
“Companies are sometimes made to understand very clearly that — if they want something — they need to provide some philanthropy or social contribution,” said George Frynas, a professor at Middlesex University Business School in London.
Rivals join efforts
Moshiri’s work has influenced the philanthropy of Chevron’s rivals. When Moshiri committed Chevron to help fund Texas Children’s Hospital’s Global Health Corps in 2011, which trains American doctors to work in developing countries, Irvingbased Exxon Mobil and The Woodlands-based Anadarko Petroleum Corp. soon joined.
“Ali’s support opened the door to support from other companies, too,” said Kline, the hospital’s chief physician. “At the time, it was completely unprecedented.”
Last year, the Africa-America Institute, a New York humanitarian nonprofit, gave Moshiri its lifetime achievement award. Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the first elected female head of state in Africa and a Nobel Peace Prize winner, presented the award, lauding Moshiri’s leadership in the establishment of an infectious disease control center in Liberia as the country battled the Ebola virus three years ago.
“Ali Moshiri has never wavered in his support for the people of Liberia,” she said.
Moshiri, in a jet-black suit, black tie, cuff links and horn-rimmed glasses, a white rose on his lapel and his silver hair swept back in a wave, grabbed the cylinder, bent forward and kissed Sirleaf ’s hand.
Then he thanked Chevron.