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Washington - Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen, in charge of the US response to the Gulf oil spill disaster, said Sunday he expected the CEO of embattled BP at Wednesday's White House crisis meeting on the spill.
Asked if Tony Hayward would attend, Allen told CBS's "Face the Nation" program: "I sent a letter to the chairman of the board, and they are certainly going to be there, and I would expect Tony Hayward would be there, too."
Allen said issues at the top of the agenda would include oil spill containment options and the claims process for victims of the massive Gulf of Mexico oil spill.
"I think we need to talk about the containment options that are out there right now and our attempts to create better redundancy and speed those up," Allen said.
President Barack Obama's political opponents have piled criticism on the president for his failure to so far meet, or talk by telephone with Hayward, who has become the public face of the disaster for BP.
The president's spokesperson Robert Gibbs earlier this week parried questions about the failure to meet Hayward, and said that the firm's chairperson was a more logical choice for any meeting.
"The corporate structure of the company makes the chairman of the board the relevant entity in approving the obligations that BP has to live up to," said Gibbs.
Obama told NBC on Tuesday that he would have fired Hayward for remarks downplaying the massive Gulf oil spill, including a much-publicised comment that he "would like my life back."
BP's chairperson Carl-Henric Svanberg, a Swede, was summoned by an official letter to the meeting with the US president on Wednesday to answer questions about the Gulf of Mexico oil spill.
On Sunday's political talk shows, foes questioned Obama's leadership over the environmental disaster and for a remark earlier this week that he was looking for someone's ass to kick.
"I think the fact that he never spoke to the CEO of BP for the first 50 days of this incident is emblematic of the kind of detached style of leadership that we're seeing here," Representative Mike Pence, chairperson of the House Republican Conference, told CNN television's "State of the Union".
"And this business about the president looking for somebody's A-double-S to kick this week - you know ... I think everybody in America knew on day two whose A-double-S ought to be kicked," Pence added.
The Deepwater Horizon, a BP-operated drilling rig, sank on April 22, two days after an explosion that killed 11 workers.
The accident triggered the underwater oil gusher that led to the worst ever US oil spill.
- AFP
