BP Plc's incoming Chief Executive Bob Dudley ousted the oil group's exploration and production chief following the Gulf of Mexico oil spill and promised to restructure the company to boost safety.
Echoing a move BP made after the Texas City blast in 2005, Dudley said on Wednesday he was appointing a new safety guru, Mark Bly, who would ensure safe practices across the organisation.
But Andy Inglis, the head of its upstream Exploration and Production unit under whose remit the blown-out well came, will leave the company, as insiders had predicted.
Bly's role will be stronger than previous safety chiefs, a BP spokesman said, because he will have representatives in each business unit that will have the authority to intervene if they feel practices are not meeting BP's safety standards.
BP said it was also reviewing its system of incentives, which critics have said encourage managers to put profits and cost-cutting ahead of safety.
Inglis becomes BP's second senior executive casualty of the spill following Dudley's replacement of ex-CEO Tony Hayward, who enraged U.S. public opinion during the crisis with his gaffes. He will leave at the end of the year with a year's salary of 690,000 pounds ($1.1 million) in lieu of notice and will retain his pension pot valued at 6 million.
If BP's bonus schemes pay out any rewards this year he may participate, although analysts think this unlikley.
Analysts said investors would be encouraged that Dudley appeared to be willing to take bold steps and was increasing the focus on safety.
"It plays well to the U.S. government and to investors who worried that BP had not been as safety conscious as some of its rivals, although we have to see more detail to know how it will work," said Iain Armstrong, oil analyst at Brewin Dolphin.
A blowout at BP's Macondo well caused an explosion on the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig which killed 11 men in April and unleashed America's worst ever oil spill.
Fears about the final bill for the disaster, along with concerns that BP's battered image in the United States could make it hard for the company to exploit its assets there, have wiped around $60 billion off the company's stock market value.
Europe's second-largest oil company by market value said it was also splitting up its core upstream division into three units: exploration, project development and production, with the aim of fostering technical expertise.
BP's internal probe into the disaster revealed its main representative on the drilling rig, and possibly his colleagues onshore in Houston who he may have consulted, were unable to correctly read a basic safety test.
BP has laid most of the blame on its contractors, but rivals said BP's own account of the disaster showed its practices fell short of industry standards.
Dudley will expand the top management team to include the heads of the three upstream units, head of safety Bly and a new head of strategy and integration.
Evgeny Solovyov, oil analyst at Societe Generale, said there was a risk that the additional safety oversight and top management positions could slow down decision-making at the company.
"I am concerned that BP might become too bureaucratic," he said, although he agreed it was crucial for BP to send a message that it was taking safety more seriously if it wanted to preserve its U.S. growth hopes.
"BP is image rebuilding mode," Solovyov said.
