Glencore Xstrata Said to Name Tony Hayward as New Chairman

(Updates with BP information in fourth paragraph.)

May 8 (Bloomberg) — Glencore Xstrata Plc, the mining company run by billionaire Ivan Glasenberg, is set to name former BP Plc Chief Executive Officer Tony Hayward as its new chairman, according to a person familiar with the decision.

The appointment of Hayward, who has been interim chairman since May last year, may be announced as early as today, the person said, declining to be identified because the information is private.

The world’s fourth-biggest mining company has been seeking a board leader for almost a year and had planned to announce a successor to Simon Murray by a May 20 shareholder meeting.

Hayward, who as been a Glencore board member since April 2011, resigned from BP in October 2010 following the Gulf of Mexico oil spill earlier that year. Eleven workers on the Deepwater Horizon oil platform died following the blowout of the Macondo well on April 20, 2010, which unleashed the worst offshore oil spill in U.S. history.

The appointment was earlier reported in the U.K.’s Daily Telegraph newspaper. Hayward, 56, plans to leave his position as CEO of Genel Energy Plc within a year or two, the paper said.

Hayward took the position of interim chairman as the company completed a $29 billion acquisition of Xstrata Plc last year and shareholders ousted then-interim Chairman John Bond.

In 2011 he teamed up with financier Nathaniel Rothschild to create Vallares Plc, a shell company that raised 1.33 billion pounds ($2.25 billion) through an initial public offering in London. Vallares that year agreed to merge with Genel, the biggest oil and gas operator in Kurdistan.

Peter Grauer, the chairman of Bloomberg LP, the parent of Bloomberg News, is a non-executive director of Glencore Xstrata.

To contact the reporters on this story: Elisabeth Behrmann in Sydney at [e-mail]; Jesse Riseborough in London at [e-mail] To contact the editors responsible for this story: Andrew Hobbs at [e-mail] Madelene Pearson