Boss who paid the price with his job but not with his pension

The chief executive is to be replaced by the American Bob Dudley, who is currently BP's managing director. The terms of Mr Hayward's departure package are thought to include a year's salary of 1m and a pension pot totalling 10.8m. His exit is expected to be formally announced this morning ahead of the company's half-year results, but it's understood that the 53-year-old's pension will pay out 584,000 a year when he turns 60. He has worked at BP for 28 years.

Since the rig exploded and sank on April 20 with the loss of 11 workers' lives, Mr Hayward has raised hackles with a series of blunders – including claiming he "wanted his life back", going sailing, and giving an evasive performance before US senators last month.

He appeared to try to minimise the environmental disaster the leak was causing, saying the amount of oil was "tiny" compared to the size of the ocean. He later described the impact as " likely to be very modest". Then an academic advisory panel of scientists concluded that the oil spill could be attributed to "an organisational culture and incentives that encourage cost-cutting and cutting of corners – that reward workers for doing it faster and cheaper, but not better".

With the recent capping of the leak, work started on a relief well to cut off the flow of oil permanently by intercepting the faulty well miles below the seabed. BP may have belatedly found a way of stemming the flow, but three years at the helm were apparently not enough to change the culture within BP, and Mr Hayward may not have caused but did preside over a cataclysmic failure, costing loss of lives and livelihoods and devastation of delicate eco-systems.

It was never in question that his head would roll over the debacle; it was just a question of when. BP might have liked to have done the deed weeks ago, but that would probably have looked panicky and shambolic, sending the company share price into even more of a tail-spin.

Perhaps the only decent piece of strategic advice the company has had was to hold fire, and part company with Mr Hayward when the oil spill had been capped and the salvage operation – for both the Gulf of Mexico and BP's reputation – started. Let a new man, not publicly associated with the nightmare, take over and send Mr Hayward off with whatever payments were agreed in his contract. You can see the logic of the plan.

But viewing the catastrophe from afar, it appears as though we have here yet another top executive unaccountably leaving the scene of the crime with an enormous financial reward.. To the ordinary person it seems as though the notions of "big business" and "moral compass" sometimes bear little relation to each other.

Meanwhile, echoes of economic disasters past have resounded with the latest story about disgraced banker Sir Fred Goodwin – blamed for the near-collapse of Royal Bank of Scotland – who has bought a new high-security Edinburgh property worth 3.5m.

He left RBS with a pension of 700,000 a year and a lump sum of nearly 3m, in a deal described at the time by Gordon Brown as "unjustifiable." Following widespread public outcry, Mr Goodwin agreed to reduce his pension payout to 200,000 a year. Thousands

of RBS staff have lost their jobs since his departure as chief executive.

The nature of the two stories is different, says Julian Rawel, director of executive education at University of Bradford's School of Management. "With Tony Hayward, my understanding is that his contract states he is entitled to a year's salary. During his many years at BP he has accrued a pension pot and not giving him what he's contributed would be unfair.

"The problem is that he has been seen as insensitive. The oil spill has been catastrophic, but the root cause has yet to be established and my understanding is that the engineering problems at BP go back a long way.

"And another question is where is the company chairman (Swedish industrialist Carl-Henric Svanberg) in all of this? In a situation this critical, surely you'd want your chairman to say to the chief executive, 'You get on with sorting out the problem, and leave me to do

the talking.'

"Tony Hayward shouldn't have had to do both jobs. I don't have any particular sympathy for him, but I don't think he should have been put in the position he found himself in. A good chairman would never have got near committing such big gaffes."