Hammer Stroke

Upheaval at Oxy-Pete

To his colleagues at the bank, he was unquestionably a whiz at finance, but around the office he seemed to some more like a human buzz saw--pugnacious, cutting, even on occasion rude. Yet apparently the very qualities that wound up costing A. Robert Abboud, 51, his post in April as the $265,000-a-year chairman of First Chicago Corp., the nation's ninth largest bank holding company, have landed him another top job at nearly twice his old salary. His new employer: Los Angeles-based Occidental Petroleum Corp., the nation's twelfth largest oil company.

Occidental's aged, autocratic chairman, Armand Hammer, 82, shoved aside the president he had installed only last year, Hungarian-born Zoltan Merszei, 57, an effective but sometimes abrasive former chairman of the Dow Chemical Co., and replaced him with Abboud. The ex-banker thus became the fifth man tapped for the Oxy-Pete presidency in the past decade by Hammer, who after 23 years at Occidental shows no signs of wanting to yield real authority to any possible successor. Said Hammer of his latest No. 2: "He's a brilliant banker and a smart businessman. He's very loyal and a man of great modesty. I like that." Abboud himself has no illusions about his chances for promotion. Says he: "Dr. Hammer will be with us a very long time. My job is to do whatever the doctor wants done. He is as youthful and brilliant as ever."

Merszei, who acquires the title of vice chairman, is to move to Houston to run the company's troubled Hooker Chemical Corp., which has been suffering from a profits-squeeze; while Hooker accounts for about a fifth of Occidental's $9.6 billion revenues, it contributed less than $10 million to the company's $561.6 million profits last year. Hooker is also under legal attack for having dumped industrial wastes in the Love Canal outside Buffalo, an episode that occurred before Occidental acquired the firm. Merszei did not try to disguise his wounded feelings about his ouster as president. Said he: "The moves were all instituted and organized by Dr. Hammer. He has a great vision. I have great confidence in him, but sometimes there are things that I do not understand."

He is not alone. Hammer set out in life to pursue a career in medicine but was diverted into business instead. In 1957 he bought Occidental, then a West Coast oil company with just eight nearly played-out wells. Though he originally aimed to use his purchase merely as a tax shelter, he got interested in building up what has become a globe-girdling enterprise with oil in the North Sea and Libya, an elaborate 20-year fertilizer deal with the Soviet Union and ownership in the U.S. of the Island Creek Coal Co., the nation's fourth largest producer.

A deal maker rather than a manager, Hammer has found that his secretive style and grabbing ways have won him few friends on Wall Street and none at all on the Securities and Exchange Commission, which has charged that in effect the company's board of directors amounts to little more than a rubber stamp for the chairman. So far, there is slight reason to believe that Abboud's arrival will change Occidental's one-man-band character very much at all.

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