Sam Laidlaw

William Samuel Hugh Laidlaw (born 3 January 1956, Kensington) is the former Chief Executive Officer of Centrica, the British natural gas and electricity company.

Early life

He is the son of Sir Christopher Laidlaw (1922-2010), former Deputy Chairman of BP. Sam Laidlaw attended Eton College and studied Law at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, gaining an MA in 1977. He qualified as a solicitor in 1979 with the Macfarlanes law company. He obtained an MBA in 1981 from the INSEAD Business School in Fontainebleau, France. His father was Director of the Management School for seven years.

Career

He was with U.S. oil company Amerada Hess (1981-2001) building their North Sea business before running their worldwide Exploration & Production business and becoming President and Chief Operating Officer (1995-2001). He was Executive Vice President of Global Business Development of the California-based Chevron Corporation from May 2003 and became Chief Executive Officer of Enterprise Oil in 2002 (which was bought under his leadership by Shell in 2002 for £3.5bn). Enterprise Oil also faced a hostile takeover from Eni, the Rome-based oil company.

The Prince

The Prince (Italian: Il Principe [il ˈprintʃipe]) is a 16th-century political treatise by the Italian diplomat and political theorist Niccolò Machiavelli. From correspondence a version appears to have been distributed in 1513, using a Latin title, De Principatibus (About Principalities). However, the printed version was not published until 1532, five years after Machiavelli's death. This was done with the permission of the Medici pope Clement VII, but "long before then, in fact since the first appearance of The Prince in manuscript, controversy had swirled about his writings".

Although it was written as if it were a traditional work in the mirrors for princes style, it is generally agreed that it was especially innovative. This is only partly because it was written in the vernacular Italian rather than Latin, a practice which had become increasingly popular since the publication of Dante's Divine Comedy and other works of Renaissance literature.

The Prince is sometimes claimed to be one of the first works of modern philosophy, especially modern political philosophy, in which the effective truth is taken to be more important than any abstract ideal. It was also in direct conflict with the dominant Catholic and scholastic doctrines of the time concerning how to consider politics and ethics.

Prince's Rainforests Project

The Prince’s Rainforests Project (PRP) was set up in the UK in 2007 by Charles, Prince of Wales following reports from leading climate change experts, including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, to promote awareness of the urgent need to take action against tropical deforestation. The Prince of Wales has long been concerned about climate change and about how destruction of the world’s rainforests contributes to rising temperatures and sea levels.

The project is working with governments, businesses and non-profit organisations around the world to quickly find solutions to deforestation, with the ambition of "making the trees worth more alive than dead".

On 5 May 2009, The Prince’s Rainforests Project launched a global awareness campaign to improve understanding of the link between rainforests and climate change and the need for urgent action to stop deforestation in the run up to the climate change conference in Copenhagen in December 2009. A number of celebrities worked with the PRP to promote the campaign.