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By Florence Tan, Julia Payne and Olga Yagova
SINGAPORE/LONDON/MOSCOW, June 9 (Reuters) - Ian Taylor, who
built Vitol into the world's biggest oil trader, has died from
pneumonia at the age of 64, the company said on Tuesday, after
surviving bouts of cancer and a stroke last year.
Oxford University graduate Taylor, one of Britain's richest
businessmen, was chairman of the Royal Opera House until 2019, a
Conservative party donor and saved iconic clothing brand Harris
Tweed from bankruptcy.
"Ian was an exceptional man. He combined energy and a
determination to succeed with humility, humour and humanity,"
Russell Hardy, his successor as Vitol CEO, said in a statement.
Taylor, who began his career at Shell in 1978 and
worked in South America and southeast Asia before joining Vitol
in 1985, turned down the offer of a knighthood from
former British Prime Minister David Cameron in 2016.
He became group President and CEO of Vitol in 1995, turning
the once modest Dutch fuel dealer into a trading operation that
spanned the world and became the biggest trading rival to the
big players such as BP and Shell, by poaching top staff.
"He challenged all of us to be the best we could be. We owe
him a great deal," Hardy added.
Taylor stepped down in 2018 as CEO of privately-owned Vitol,
which is run from London and last year traded around 8 million
barrels of oil per day.
Under the British executive, Vitol carried on trading
Iranian fuel oil in 2012, despite U.S. sanctions imposed by
former President Barack Obama.
Taylor told The Times newspaper last year that he was first
diagnosed with throat cancer in his late fifties and would
donate funds to build the proton beam therapy machine that saved
his life in London.
(Reporting by Julia Payne, Olga Yagova and Florence Tan;
Writing by Julia Payne; Editing by Louise Heavens and Alexander
Smith)
