Peter Sutherland, dubbed father of globalisation, dies

Peter Sutherland, a globetrotting Irishman who pulled off one of the biggest multilateral trade agreements, wielding an auctioneer’s gavel to secure the “Uruguay Round” in 1994, has died. He was 71.

In his role as head of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (Gatt), Sutherland persuaded 123 countries to agree new rules on agriculture and textiles, as well as services, intellectual property and a mechanism for resolving trade disputes. Mickey Kantor, then-US trade representative, dubbed the Irishman the father of globalisation long before the term acquired its current negative connotation.

Sutherland’s family said in a statement that he died in hospital in Dublin on Sunday. He had been ill for some time. Leo Varadkar, Ireland’s prime minister, paid tribute to Sutherland, saying he was “a statesman in every sense of the word; an Irishman, a committed European and a proud internationalist.” “Throughout his life, he was a champion for individual and economic freedoms,” Mr Varadkar said.

A former Irish attorney-general and Ireland’s commissioner in Brussels, Sutherland stepped down in 1995 as head of the World Trade Organization, the successor to Gatt, and used his contacts to launch a second career in business.

He chaired BP, the UK’s largest company, from 1997 to 2009 and headed Goldman Sachs International, the London-based global arm of the US investment bank, from 1995 to 2015. Sutherland professed to know little about business but saw his role more as a high level diplomatic fixer, using his knowledge of statecraft to help companies win deals and stay out of trouble.

An inveterate networker, he was on first name terms with presidents and prime ministers. He also had a lawyer’s forensic mind, and the natural skills of a good negotiator: patience, charm and a toughness when needed.

He also seemed to have a knack of being close to controversy without being tarnished by it. He was a non-executive director at Royal Bank of Scotland from 2001 to 2009 during the bank’s rise and spectacular fall from grace and near collapse under the leadership of Fred Goodwin.

He quit BP in December 2009 just months before the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico that killed 11 people and led to massive legal costs.

He was also in the late Libyan dictator Muammer Gaddafi’s tent when former British prime minister Tony Blair signed BP’s contentious gas deal in 2007. He was embroiled in the row that erupted when it emerged that the London School of Economics, where he was chairman, had taken a gift from Saif Gaddafi, the Libyan leader’s son. The revelations led to LSE chief executive Howard Davies stepping down, not Sutherland.

Critics say he could have done more at BP to curb John Browne, the chief executive who presided over a period of rapid growth but was blamed for safety lapses that led to a series of industrial accidents, including an explosion at the Texas City refinery in 2005 that killed 15 people.

It was Sutherland who ultimately forced Lord Browne to stand down. But it was a measure of their difficult relationship that having worked together for more than a decade, Sutherland barely received a mention when Lord Browne wrote his memoirs.

Peter Denis Sutherland was born in Dublin in 1946. The son of an insurance salesman, he was educated by Jesuits at Gonzaga College, one of Ireland’s leading private schools.

After studying law at University College Dublin, he joined the Irish bar, where as a young barrister he acted in the 1970 Arms Trial, successfully defending James Kelly, an Irish army officer accused of shipping weapons to the IRA. One of those also acquitted was the finance minister and future Irish prime minister Charles Haughey.

Sutherland briefly flirted with politics, standing unsuccessfully as parliamentary candidate for the right-of-centre Fine Gael party in 1973 in Dublin North West.

Garret FitzGerald, the Fine Gael prime minister who had been his tutor at UCD, appointed him attorney-general in 1981 at the height of the troubles in Northern Ireland. He then sent him to Brussels, where at 38 he was the youngest ever European Commissioner.

It was his time in charge of EU competition policy that shaped his political outlook, developing a life-long belief that rules based co-operation among countries was the best way to avoid the mercantilism of the past.

Like the EU’s founding fathers, he saw Europe above all as a moral enterprise, arguing that greater integration was a way to check the nationalism that disfigured the continent’s recent history.

“I always believed in the taming of nationalism. I’ve seen too much of it in my own country,” he said in 2016.

Jean-Claude Juncker, European Commission president, said: “Peter Sutherland reflected the core values of the European spirit in his everyday work and was convinced that by working together, great things can be achieved.”

Globalisation for Sutherland was a way to empower the poor. But he sometimes appeared insensitive to the pressures politicians had grappling with its consequences.

This was evident when he appeared before a House of Lords committee in 2014 and stunned peers by suggesting part of the EU’s mission was to “undermine the homogeneity” of nation states by welcoming greater numbers of migrants.

Sutherland was also the first non-Swedish director at Ericsson, and the first non-US director of Delta Air Lines. He was an adviser to Sweden’s Wallenberg family and received an honorary knighthood in 2004 for services to British trade.

One role he was particularly proud of was that of economic aide to the Vatican, where he was titled Consultor of the Extraordinary Section of the Administration of the Patrimony of the Apostolic See.

Ultimately his lack of high office at home in Ireland probably ruled him out of the job he really coveted — that of president of the European Commission for which his name was mentioned as a successor to Jacques Delors in 1995.

The policy initiative he said he was most proud of was the Erasmus student exchange programme introduced when he briefly held the education portfolio in the Delors’ cabinet in 1986.

He leaves a wife Maruja, whom he originally met when she was in Dublin as a Spanish exchange student, and three children. One of his two sons is an official in the European Commission.

Letters in response to this obituary:

How Sutherland helped the WTO come into being / From Paul Moen, Ottawa, ON, Canada

Sutherland believed in the positive value of migration / From Edward Mortimer, Burford, Oxon, UK