AFTER three decades running the company he founded in Edinburgh in 1980, Scotland rugby internationalist Sir Bill Gammell was bound to want to slow down before long, writes Mark Williamson.

It is no great surprise that the 58-year-old has decided he is ready to move into a non-executive role, having spent the last few years completing a commute between Edinburgh and New Delhi that would have exhausted a much younger man.

Sir Bill will retain the responsibility for leading efforts to win official approval for Cairn’s blockbuster deal to sell the bulk of its interests in India to Vedanta Resources.

This means he will have to make a few more official trips to India with no guarantee of success. Although Sir Bill has spent years cultivating relationships in India he may be unable to persuade ministers to approve the deal without attaching unpalatable conditions. Cairn will then need to decide what to do with an Indian subsidiary that generates huge amounts of cash from the bumper finds it has made in the country.

Despite the continued uncertainty about the fate of the Vedanta deal, there is an obvious rationale for Cairn’s decision to appoint legal and commercial director Simon Thomson to replace Sir Bill.

Besides dealing with commercial matters in India, Mr Thomson has played a key role in persuading the authorities in Greenland to allot vast tracts of unexplored offshore acreage to Cairn. The company believes there is the potential to achieve even bigger success in Greenland than it has in India.

But given the size of its acreage in Greenland, Cairn Energy has a huge task on its hands in the country. With that in mind, directors may have concluded that it made sense to leave deputy chief executive Mike Watts to do what he may do best and obviously loves doing: frontier exploration.