Monday Business Edition

The reports risked setting off a new controversy over the handling of the Gulf of Mexico oil disaster for which BP faces huge clean-up and damage costs and has been a public relations catastrophe for the conglomerate.

The BP board meets in London on Monday but the company insisted no final decision has been reached on a management change.

The BBC said Hayward was negotiating his exit and an announcement was likely by Monday when the BP board meets ahead of second quarter results expected to reveal a 30-billion-dollar provision for paying for the disaster.

In the Gulf, US oil spill chief Thad Allen said BP’s long-awaited operation to permanently plug the leaking Gulf of Mexico well had been delayed until the week beginning August 2.

“We expect to begin the first well in the next few weeks,” spokesman David Nicholas told AFP, adding that the 2007 deal signed with Libya to explore the Gulf of Sirte included commitments to drill five wells.

Although he could not give a detailed timeframe, he said: “These wells can take six months or more to drill.”

The British energy giant said it noted “the press speculation over the weekend regarding potential changes to management” as well as the charge for the costs of the spill.

“BP confirms that no final decision has been made on these matters,” the company statement said.

Citing a senior BP source, the BBC said that an announcement is due shortly on Hayward, whose future has been in doubt for several weeks over his handling of the worst environmental disaster in US history.

There is a “strong likelihood” that he will be replaced by Bob Dudley, who took over management of BP’s response to the spill from Hayward last month, the public broadcaster added.

Chavez broke off diplomatic relations with Bogota Thursday in response to charges by President Alvaro Uribe that 1,500 Colombian guerrillas had set up camp inside Venezuela and were launching attacks from its territory.

The firebrand leftist president said on Sunday he had intelligence that “the possibility of an armed aggression against Venezuelan territory from Colombia” was higher than it has been “in 100 years.”

“We previously saw a robust, V-shaped recovery in exports after the financial crisis. Now the speed of the recovery is tapering off,” said Atsushi Kamio, economist at the Daiwa Research Institute.

However, the slow-down was less sharp than economists had expected.

Geithner was asked on NBC’s “Meet the Press” whether he thought the economy would dip back into recession before things got better.

“No, I don’t,” he answered.

His 700-hectare land in the central Volga region of Tatarstan has not been touched by a drop of rain in weeks amid one of the severest heatwaves of the century in Russia. He already fears he has lost two thirds of his harvest.

“It is a catastrophe,” he said, ruefully fingering the dried-up ears of wheat. “This year I am going to make no profit. It will only be enough to buy fodder.”

News Corp. chief digital officer Jon Miller also said it was too early to make any judgements about the experiment of News Corp.’s The Times with a paid website but charging online readers was “an idea whose time has come.”

“A year ago, we were pretty out front with the idea that content has value,” Miller told an audience of top technology and media executives at the Fortune Brainstorm Tech conference here.

On Friday the closely watched Ifo survey of around 2,500 companies showed sentiment in Europe’s biggest economy surging at its strongest rate since the reunification of East and West Germany in 1990.

Jennifer McKeown at Capital Economics said this suggested that the German economy was performing well, “not only compared with others in the eurozone but also with the rest of the world.”

German business confidence is soaring while U.S. consumer sentiment sinks.

Britain’s second-quarter economic growth was almost twice as fast as expected, the strongest in four years.

In appearances on several Sunday talk shows, Geithner said only 2 to 3 percent of Americans — those making $250,000 or more a year — will be affected when tax cuts enacted under former President George W. Bush end on schedule this year.

Republicans want to extend the tax cuts and Democrats are divided but Geithner said reductions for top earners should end.

While analysts expected export growth to slow from a sharp rebound in the first quarter, the yen’s recent gains and signs of a slowdown in big markets such as the United States and China have heightened uncertainty on the outlook for Japan’s export-reliant economy.

“Exports to China may have peaked for now. Shipments to Europe and the United States can’t be relied on either. That means the key will be whether exports to other Asian nations sustain momentum,” said Takeshi Minami, chief economist at Norinchukin Research Institute.

The oil company said its board would meet Monday evening, a day before it announces earnings for the second quarter.

“BP notes the press speculation over the weekend regarding potential changes to management and the charge for the costs of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. BP confirms that no final decision has been made on these matters,” the company said in a statement to the London Stock Exchange.

A senior U.S. government official said Sunday that Hayward is on his way out but didn’t know who would be his successor. The official was briefed on the decision last week and spoke on condition of anonymity because an announcement had not been made.

BP said Monday that “no final decision” had been made about management changes. The oil company said its board would meet Monday evening, a day before it announces earnings for the second quarter. Shares were up 2.2 percent at 407.6 pence ($6.31) in early trading in London.

The departure of the man who became the vilified public face of the Gulf oil spill changes very little for BP. His successor still faces what could be decades of cleaning up and paying for one of the worst environmental disasters in American history.

Experts said Sunday that the new chief must also persuade thousands of employees to embrace a culture of safety that Hayward apparently failed to instill. He’ll need to mend fences among BP’s partners in the Gulf and convince the U.S. government and public they can trust it to safely do business here.

Basil downy mildew first surfaced in the U.S. around 2007 and is slowly but surely ruining the herb at spots across the country. Hardest hit areas are on the East Coast but it also has been found as far west as California.

For growers, the fungus can be devastating.

Chavez made his warning in an outdoor speech to thousands of supporters, saying: “If there is any armed aggression against Venezuela from Colombian territory or anywhere else supported by the Yankee empire, we … would suspend shipments of oil to the United States!”

“We wouldn’t send another drop of oil to its refineries, not a single drop more!” Chavez shouted, adding that the United States is “the big one to blame for all the tension in this part of the world.”

A third possibility: Maybe the economy doesn’t matter so much.

Larry Hatheway, an economist at UBS, says economic growth means companies selling more things. But he thinks that is not as important as it used to be to generating the profits needed to send stocks higher. That’s because U.S. firms have mastered the art of pulling more and more money from each dollar of sales.

General Electric Co. used compounds called PCBs, now known to cause cancer, in producing transformers from 1932 to 1977 at its 254-acre plant in Pittsfield, Mass. Under a federal consent decree about two decades after it stopped, the company began cleaning up PCBs that had spewed for years into a residential neighborhood and a 2-mile stretch of the Housatonic.

Now, the $400 million first phase of the cleanup is almost over. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency must decide in coming months what to do about pollution in the rest of the 149-mile river that flows through rural western Massachusetts and Connecticut and empties into Long Island Sound.

It’s a fear that automakers must overcome as they push to sell more battery-powered cars. So government and business are taking steps to reassure drivers by building up the nation’s network of electric charging stations.

The hope is Americans will become more comfortable buying cars such as Nissan’s all-electric Leaf, due out late this year, which can travel just 100 miles on a single charge. That’s fine for a commute but potentially stressful for longer road trips.

Now the agency is hoping to rework the plan, which relies on a prime slice of airwaves called the D Block. But many public safety officials say the commission is, once again, going about it the wrong way.

In 2008, the FCC attempted to auction off the block to the wireless industry, with a requirement that the winning bidder help build out a sturdy communications network that would be shared with first responders and give them priority in an emergency. But those conditions proved too onerous, and the auction failed to attract any serious bidders.

A French court is awaiting a verdict on who was to blame for the accident, which killed 109 aboard the plane and four on the ground, and devastated the reputation of the jet. The Concorde, which ferried the rich and famous across the Atlantic for three decades and could fly twice as fast as the speed of sound, was taken out of service in 2003.

Some 100 family members, witnesses of the crash and Air France officials attended ceremonies Sunday marking 10 years since the plane crashed after takeoff from Charles de Gaulle Airport, plowing into a hotel in the Paris suburb of Gonesse.