BP CEO attends yacht race, sparks new controversy

BP CEO Tony Hayward delivers his opening statement about the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico at the House Energy and Commerce Committee on Capitol Hill in Washington, June 17, 2010. Picture taken June 17, 2010.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - BP Plc CEO Tony Hayward watched a yacht race off the English coast on Saturday, sparking new controversy in the United States as his company struggles to plug its huge Gulf of Mexico oil leak.

Sheila Williams, a spokeswoman for the British energy giant, said Hayward was spending time with his teenage son at the Isle of Wight boat race after devoting most of the past two months to the oil spill away from his family.

Hayward was lambasted by angry U.S. lawmakers at a congressional hearing on Thursday, where he was accused of ducking responsibility for the spill.

The Obama administration, which has been harshly critical of Hayward over some of his public statements since the spill began in April, renewed its criticism of the CEO over his attendance at the race.

"This has just been part of a long line of PR gaffes and mistakes," White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel said in an interview taped for ABC's "This Week" week program, referring to Hayward.

President Barack Obama, who has been criticized for his administration's response to the spill, himself attended a baseball game in Washington on Friday night and played golf on Saturday.

Obama wondered aloud in a television interview this month about "whose ass to kick" over the BP spill and said that if Hayward had worked for him, he would have fired him.

Hayward was also widely criticized and quickly apologized for complaining he wanted his "life back" weeks after the April 20 Deepwater Horizon offshore rig explosion that killed 11 workers and led to the worst oil spill in U.S. history.

"Well, to quote Tony Hayward, he's got his life back, as he would say," Emanuel said, commenting on his attendance at the yacht race. "And I think we can all conclude that Tony Hayward is not going to have a second career in PR consulting."

"There's really a substance here that matters," Emanuel added. "That's clearly a PR mistake, but he's made a number of those mistakes. What's important is: are we capping the well? Are we capturing the oil? Are we containing the cleanup? Are we filing the claims? Are we also cleaning up the mess? That's what's important."

Opinion about Hayward's attendance at the race was mixed among residents of the U.S. Gulf Coast, hard hit by the spill.

"You've got to think about all the fish that are dying out there, all the birds that are dying ... and that's going to never come back," said Venice, Louisiana resident, Wilma Buras. "So Hayward going out wasn't the best way ... absolutely not."

Jim Bowman, a recreational fisherman in Venice, said there was a lot of work to be done cleaning up the spill, but "family is the most important thing, so he's got to spend time with his family."

(Reporting by Will Dunham; Additional reporting by Lindsay Claiborn and Jeffrey Jones; Editing by Peter Cooney)