Biography|Jim Ratcliffe — The Lancaster House Table Where INEOS Signed With China

On 10 January 2011 Jim Ratcliffe sat at a signing table in Lancaster House, off The Mall, while Nick Clegg and Li Keqiang looked on.

The Foreign Office photograph shows him putting his name to two papers: a framework agreement between INEOS and PetroChina on the refineries at Grangemouth in Scotland and Lavera in France, and a strategic co-operation deal with China National Petroleum Corporation on refining and petrochemical technology.

GOV.UK recorded the ceremony as part of a bundle of UK-China agreements that officials valued at about 2.6 billion pounds.

The man at the table had built the company in May 1998. INEOS's own history page still starts there: one former BP site in Antwerp, bought for 84 million pounds, 400 people on the books.

The name is a contraction of Inspec Ethylene Oxide and Specialities, the activity he took out of Inspec when he left that earlier vehicle.

From that Belgian plant he bought unwanted units from ICI, BP and others on high-yield debt.

By 2011 the question was no longer whether INEOS existed. It was which state oil company would sit across the table.

Lancaster House is a government palace, not an INEOS office. That is the point of the pin.

The deal that was supposed to back Grangemouth and Lavera was signed in a state room because both governments wanted the picture.

PetroChina later put a dollar figure on the refining offer: just over one billion dollars for half of the European refining business. The photograph here is the earlier moment, when the framework was still a pair of folders on a cloth.

For a living chairman the rule is simple. The words on the GOV.UK release stay on GOV.UK.

The memory only needs the date, the room, and the two sites named in the paper he signed.

Photo: Foreign and Commonwealth Office, Open Government Licence v1.0, via Wikimedia Commons.