Access Investments-European Union- ROMANIA

Ten years ago, Lord Browne, the then chief executive of BP, flew to Williamsburg, Virginia, for a board meeting, where he planned to outline detailed proposals for a mega-merger with Royal Dutch Shell.  The radical tie-up had been discussed in secret weeks earlier with Jeroen van Der Veer, his counterpart at Shell, during a stroll around Lake Como in Italy.  With an estimated $9bn (£5.3bn) of synergies from the deal and Browne’s conviction that he had the backing of his own executive team, including his eventual successor Tony Hayward, the BP chief was ready to deliver the grand plan. But on the flight out of the UK, he suddenly got cold feet.  “I knew the answer even before the meeting started. The sentiment was 'why rock the boat?’ The Shell merger was not discussed. It was not going to be done and that was that… In the end we did not rock the boat; we missed it,” he recounted in his memoirs four years ago.  Browne, who stepped down in 2007, was among a generation of buccaneering oil major executives who had overseen a wave of mega-mergers at the end of the nineties that totally reshaped the industry.