There is really no need to go to far to know why US President George W Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair get along so famously.
The missing link has now been discovered — William Gammell, the CEO of Cairn Energy, the whizz-kid oil company that has boomed over the past year.
According to The Telegraph, former Scottish rugby international Gammell, 51, was not only Blair’s classmate and and school debating partner, but also shared his childhood with him and Bush.
Gammell, who has just been crowned Ernst and Young Entrepreneur of the Year, used to have George junior over at his place during the school holidays because Gammell’s father, James Gammell, was also in the oil business and was a friend of George Bush Senior.
James Gammell is the founder of the Scottish fund manager, Ivory and Sime, which in 1950 backed Bush-Overby, Bush Senior’s fledgling oil and natural-gas business. Their sons struck up a friendship and spent childhood holidays together at the Bush family compound at Kennebunkport, Maine, and the Gammell family farm in Perthshire.
And so, when Bush became President, his first words to Blair were, “I believe you know my old friend, Bill Gammell.”
The links between the three men have multiplied and strengthened since their childhood.
The loyal Gammell is rigorously discreet about his two famous friends, but he has acknowledged: “I learned a lot about the oil business from George W Bush.”
Last year Cairn Energy struck the mother lode of oil fields in India, with four oil strikes in seven months in Rajasthan, raising the firm’s financial stakes to 2.4 billion pounds, and turning Gammell into a multi-millionaire.
Cairn had been in a 50/50 joint Indian venture with Shell but the oil giant pulled out when the nodding donkeys failed to suck any oil from 2,000 square miles of Rajasthani desert.
Gammell, though, kept on wildcatting, against his better nature.
“I learned two golden rules, double what you are told are the technical risks, and halve what you are told about the upside,” Gammell said.
Despite this pessimism, in 2002 Cairn bought out Shell’s half for four million pounds and increased the drilling. By Christmas 2003, the Rajasthan field still wasn’t looking good and Cairn had spent 56 million pounds, a fifth of the then value of the company, and still not found major strikes.
Then in January 2004, Cairn struck black gold – a billion-barrel oil lagoon.
In less than a year, Cairn Energy’s share price has more than tripled.
Last month, the firm entered the FTSE-100. This year Gammell will earn four million pounds, making him Britain’s second-highest paid oilman after Lord Browne, the head of BP. The latest conservative estimate of his personal fortune is 30 million pounds. (ANI)
