More than three decades after founding the company Aidan Heavey is stepping down as chairman of oil business Tullow Oil (TLW).
In July Heavey, 65, will hand over to former Drax (DRX) chief executive Dorothy Thompson.
Heavey conceived the business in the mid-1980s in a town called Tullow within an hour’s drive of Dublin. He was discussing with a friend the existence of smaller oil fields in Africa which had been abandoned by the big oil companies.
Despite having no industry experience to speak of he set up Tullow to revamp some old natural gas fields in Senegal he had discovered through a contact at the World Bank.
As Heavey himself has said: ‘No one thought Tullow would succeed because of my lack of knowledge of the industry, no major backers and I was starting a company in a country with no oil industry.’
HITTING THE HEIGHTS OF THE FTSE 100
However, retaining this African focus, Tullow saw exploration success drive it all the way into the FTSE 100. It looked fairly established as a blue chip before a combination of an over-stretched balance sheet and a collapse in the oil price sent it crashing back into the FTSE 250 where it resides today.
The company first listed on the London Stock Exchange in 1989. Having bumped around for a decade or more, acquiring assets in the UK and as far afield as Pakistan, Egypt and Romania, the story really began to accelerate in the mid-noughties.
Through the 2004 and 2006 acquisitions of Energy Africa and Hardman Resources respectively it picked up the Ghana and Uganda acreage which subsequently yielded the giant Jubilee and Kingfisher fields. In September 2007 it was promoted to the FTSE 100. Having traded at around 60p at the start of the century, Tullow reached peaks above £15 in 2012.
BEFORE BEING BASHED BY THE OIL CRASH
Of late a more patchy exploration track record and the aforementioned pressure on the balance sheet has undermined the share price, which now stands at 214.9p.
In 2017 the company announced a $750m rights issue to help get debt under control and Heavey moved from his role as CEO to the chairman’s seat, to be replaced by Paul McDade.
