What is it like to be at the helm of a company with a bigger turnover than his own country's GDP? Mr Peter Sutherland laughs, then brushes away the notion with his standard-brand deflection.

"Come on I can't comment on that! Besides, I'm not at the helm of BP, I'm just the non-executive chairman."

But the notion that Mr Sutherland merely wanders through life under a lucky star is wearing a little thin. Getting to be chairman of one billion-dollar company might be lucky; heading the board of another, and being a director of many more, would be like winning the lottery every week for a month statistically impossible.

Leaving aside his famed CV, replete with Legion d'Honneur medal, some observers still remember that Jacques Delors described him as "the real author of the new Europe"; how the Sutherland Report corralled Europe's internal market from theory into practice; how, when the globalisation process was almost dead in the water, the US's Mr Mickey Kantor and Britain's Sir Leon Brittan came looking for an Irishman to bail it out.

What he will talk about, however, is the merger of his BP and Amoco, a deal that stunned the industry and created a $110 billion global energy giant to rival Shell and Exxon.

"There are a number of reasons why this agreement makes strategic sense," he told The Irish Times last night. "There will be enormous cost savings downstream in the United States. The company will be the largest producer of oil and gas in the United States, and will share top place for retail east of the Rockies and be number two overall."

The company will also become the number one oil producer in the politically-stable OECD area, he added, and significantly expands BP's involvement in gas, an energy likely to gain in importance in the next century.

"It provides the scope, scale and global reach equal to Shell and Exxon, and necessary to compete in the battle for resources," he said. "We are now the sixth largest company in the world of any kind in terms of profits, the ninth in terms of market capital."

The deal happened with speed, and secrecy, he said, and would no doubt mean an extra burden: "The implications from a work point of view will only become obvious in time, but it is extremely interesting to be involved with such a major undertaking."

But then, it has been an eventful week, beginning with the confirmation by Goldman Sachs that it would float up to 15 per cent of the partnership. As a senior partner and chairman of Goldman Sachs International Mr Sutherland will share in the deferred pay-out of between $3 billion and $5 billion.