[1] Browne was lauded during this period as he engineered mergers with rival Amoco and ARCO, and gained access to Russian oil reserves with the creation of TNK-BP.

Nicknamed the "Sun King" for his management style, he was also praised for transforming the oil and gas industry's approach to climate change, and for creating a renewable and alternative energy business within BP.

He is a former president of the Royal Academy of Engineering[2] (2006 to July 2011), and has served on the boards of Goldman Sachs, Intel and Daimler Benz.

Lord Browne of Madingley is a former partner at Riverstone Holdinds, where he was co-head of the world's largest renewable energy private equity fund.

[3][4] Many members of Browne's Jewish maternal family, including his grandparents, were murdered at the Birkenau concentration camp during The Holocaust.

Between 1969 and 1983, he held a variety of exploration and production posts in Anchorage, Alaska, New York, San Francisco, London and Canada.

He was appointed group chief executive on 10 June 1995 after the British government sold its last remaining stake in the company.

Browne stated that the right to self-determination was crucial for people everywhere, and that he saw his company's mission as to find ways to meet current needs without excessive harm to the environment, while developing future, more sustainable sources of energy.

[12] Browne says he felt under pressure to resign due to UK newspaper Mail on Sunday's revelations about his personal life and relationship with Chevalier.

It is a matter of deep disappointment that a newspaper group has now decided that allegations about my personal life should be made public.

[7] However, Mr Justice Eady, the presiding judge in the case, said he decided not to refer the matter to the Attorney General, seeing disclosure in the judgement of Lord Browne's behaviour as "probably sufficient punishment",[7] and adding Browne's "willingness to tell a deliberate lie to the court, persisted in for about two weeks, ... is relevant in assessing his own credibility and the overall merits.

[14] BP chairman, Peter Sutherland, characterised claims that company assets and resources had been abused as "unfounded or insubstantive".

[16] Browne left Cuadrilla in 2015 to become executive chairman of L1 Energy, "an oil and gas firm backed by Russian billionaire Mikhail Fridman.

[25] In June 2010, he was appointed as the Government's lead non-executive director, charged with recruiting business leaders to reformed departmental boards.

[26] In October 2010, it was announced that he had been appointed chairman of the advisory board at Stanhope Capital as the asset manager gears up for international expansion.

The former chief executive of BP will help advise on attracting investment from charities and endowment trusts, which at present make up a small number of the Stanhope's total clients.

He is the founder and chairman of the John Browne Charitable Trust, which "supports projects that will make a tangible difference to the lives of people with great potential, particularly those from under-represented backgrounds."

[citation needed] In 2015, he was co-author of the report that launched the Global Apollo Programme, which calls for developed nations to commit to spending 0.02% of their GDP for 10 years, to fund co-ordinated research to make carbon-free baseload electricity less costly than electricity from coal by the year 2025.

[36] On 12 October 2010, the report of the inquiry headed by Lord Browne of Madingley was published under the title Securing a Sustainable Future for Higher Education.

[37][38] Browne is described by journalist and author Tom Bower as responsible for a "ruthless" programme of cost-cutting at BP that compromised safety, and thus the man most responsible for a string of major accidents including the Texas City refinery explosion (2005) and the Deepwater Horizon explosion (2010).

Lord Browne of Madingley lives in Chelsea in London, where his home was created by the British furniture and interiors designer Tim Gosling.