Newsmaker: Subir Raha

Oil czar lands in trouble

Till 4:55 pm this Wednesday, it was a wonderful week for the 56-year Subir Raha, chairman and managing director of the $14 billion ONGC. His board had just okayed a 44 per cent hike in net profits for the April-June quarter.

Just the day before, the Prime Minister himself cleared a Rs 30,000-crore investment plan for ONGC's subsidiary Mangalore Refineries and Petrochemicals Limited (MRPL) after the petroleum ministry sat on the proposal for months.

And the week before that, Raha inked a prestigious deal with the $22-billion Lakshmi Mittal. With this deal, both ONGC and Mittal will jointly acquire overseas oil equity and set up energy-related businesses like energy trading and shipping, to take advantage of the strong presence of the Mittals in oil- and gas-rich countries like Kazakhstan.

All this after a year in which Petroleum Minister Mani Shankar Aiyar seemed to have made Raha a personal target, refusing to clear project after project of the company, and even making snide remarks at a public meeting about ONGC's poor track record when it came to finding new oil.

"Maybe, ONGC needs to have a partner like Cairn," Aiyar said in what was probably the sharpest rebuke Raha has heard for a long time, and then went on to say, "you could find oil in old places only if you had new ideas", making it clear to all that ONGC had none.

ONGC's ambitious plans to set up a chain of petrol pumps under MRPL were also put on ice with Aiyar refusing to allow Raha to form a joint venture to execute the project.

Ironically, given the accident of an offshore vessel with the Mumbai offshore north platform, Aiyar did not clear Raha's proposal to set up a JV to handle the transport logistics business either.

Even Raha's admirers will admit that while he has cleaned up ONGC to a large extent and improved its exploration record (for the first time in years, ONGC is discovering more acreage than it is using up), he has not made any attempt to win friends either.

One of his first acts after taking over as the ONGC chief was to send off an e-mail to all his new colleagues telling them what the public perception of the PSU was and of the reputation it had among suppliers -- he then set up an active intranet, giving everyone a chance to bring forward complaints about wrongdoing in the organisation.

For someone who was the HR director at Indian Oil (prior to that, Raha was the head of the Oil Coordination Committee), Raha exhibited extraordinary lack of skills while dealing with senior board-level colleagues.

Used to late nights in the office, and on the Internet, the chain-smoking Raha thought little of keeping colleagues in the office till 10 in the evening, discussing various proposals.

Not surprising then, that when a helicopter carrying ONGC personnel working at Mumbai offshore crashed on August 11, 2003, killing 22 people, Raha had to face the ire of his staff who even stoned his car.

As for the petroleum ministry, not only did Raha object to the proposal to stuff his board with government nominees, he ran a long battle of letters on the subject.

And it was after a long battle with the previous Director-General of Hydrocarbons that Raha's plans for redevelopment of the ageing Mumbai offshore fields were finally cleared.

That Raha likes to live life dangerously, of course, is best seen from the room for his visitors at ONGC's New Delhi headquarters -- it has pictures of both the current prime minister as well as the previous one!