William Tavoulareas

William Peter Tavoulareas, (1919 - 1996), president of Mobil Oil Corporation beginning in 1969, he was appointed to the position by Mobil chairman and chief executive, Rawleigh Warner.

Biography

The son of a Greek-American butcher and Italian-American mother from Brooklyn, whose name few oilmen could pronounce, "Tav" became a phenomenon within Mobil after joining the company after WWII. He was a lawyer-accountant, irreverent, fast-talking numbers-man who had the crucial Rockefeller talent for lightning mental arithmetic. Like other Greeks in the oil business he had an instinctive global awareness. The Greeks had traditionally been the diplomats in the old Ottoman Empire, dealing with Arabs on behalf of their Turkish masters (see [http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel_library/sevensisters/7sisters9.html] ).

"Tav" was a forthright Brooklyn boy, outspoken and impatient with the slow style of the company. As Mobil became more dependent on the Middle East consortia, particularly Aramco, so Warner decided that there was only one man in Mobil who could really understand the accounting well enough to hold his own with the Exxon expert, Howard Page. He thus promoted Tavoulareas to be Middle East negotiator. Tav would then explain to his Mobil colleagues, when battling with Exxon: 'this is what they want, this is how they'll try to get it, and this is how we'll stop them'; and he did.

Tavoulareas was widely regarded as the ablest of the major oilmen in the post war period. He sat in shirt-sleeves, talking at top speed, blinking, twitching and staring, running to the telephone like an imp let loose; saying gimme and lemme, whadda ya want. In the Middle East, Tav was determined to increase Mobil's share, and was much more prepared to consider new partnership arrangements, which antagonised the other sisters, but also brought him closer to the producers; and he formed a close friendship with Yamani in Saudi Arabia.

Tavoulareas was also the recipient the AHEPA Award, the prestigious awards to recognize members of the community for their contributions and achievements in their chosen field of endeavor.

In 1982 Tavoulareas won a $2 million libel suit against the Washington Post for saying he used his corporate position to " set up his son" in a shipping business. The jury's award was overturned in 1987 by a federal appeals court, which found that since Tavoulareas was a "public figure", the Post could be held liable only if it acted with malicious intent--even though the story was found untrue. The U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear Tavoulareas's appeal of that decision.