Serica Energy plc said nominee Robert Lawson will join the board as a non-executive director on completion of the company’s acquisition of Tailwind Energy Investments Ltd.
Tailwind’s largest shareholder Mercuria Energy Group made the nomination, along with that of Guillaume Vermersch, under the terms of the sales and purchase agreement.
Mr Lawson spent 32 years with bp before joining Mercuria in 2022 as executive vice president and a member of the board.
He is based in Geneva and his accountabilities include Mercuria’s assets and investments.
While at bp, Mr Lawson worked in upstream, downstream and trading businesses.
From 2009 to 2012, he was commercial vice president for bp’s refining and marketing business before becoming the global head of mergers and acquisitions where he oversaw in excess of $100bn of M&A transactions during his ten-year tenure.
In conjunction with that role, Mr Lawson held accountability for bp’s global gas and power trading activity from 2018 to 2019.
He also led bp’s biggest change programmes in recent times when, in supporting the CEO, he was programme director for both ‘Reset BP’, after the Deepwater Horizon incident, and ‘Reinvent BP’ in 2020.
Mr Lawson holds a Masters in Management Science from Stanford University and graduated in Economics with Statistics from Bristol University.