LOOKING out to sea, Sir Richard Giordano is waiting for his boat to come in. The American-born chairman of BG and architect of the British utility sector’s burst into competition, has spent the week prowling his US holiday home in Maine, checking the horizon. He’s anxious to take delivery of a new yacht, being crewed over the Atlantic from the Mediterranean, due any day now.

It’s the same journey made by Giordano’s father, an Italian tailor who set up a business in New York that provided a springboard for his children’s ambitions. Richard, his younger son, had further to go than most. After a career in law and business in America, he moved to Britain, headed BOC, retired, and came back to sort out privatised British Gas, and oversee its transformation into BG, Centrica and Lattice. Last week Giordano announced he was retiring again, stepping down from BG in December.

“I’ll be 70 next year,” he says. “I’ll have served 10 years. I think that’s enough at any company. You become part of history — new people should come in and take it forward.”

Tall, confident, humorous, his grey hair swept back and Italian good looks still intact, Giordano has played a leading role in British business for more than two decades. Knighted in 1989 and naturalised as a Brit last year, he is one of the few business leaders to have exercised unbroken influence in both the Thatcher and Blair eras.

A famously smooth operator, oozing charm with his gravelly East Coast accent, he is revered in business circles as an accomplished strategist. As well as sitting on several blue-chip boards — Rio Tinto, National Power, Reuters and Grand Metropolitan — he has also served as godfather to a generation of influential British bosses: Sir Roy Gardner, chief executive at Centrica, John Parker, chairman of National Grid/Lattice, David Varney, chairman of MM02 and Business in the Community, and more.

In other circles, of course, Giordano is a controversial figure, the first £1m-a-year, fat-cat boss — by his own admission always “a high-pay guy” — and seen by many as instigator of the ever-bigger salary cycle.

Indeed, some feel Giordano’s boat really came in years ago, when his BOC remuneration made him the highest-paid public-company boss in Britain. At British Gas, he presided over the Cedric Brown rumpus, when his first chief executive was hounded for a pay hike to £475,000. Brown was eventually sacrificed. Giordano survived and went on to pay his executives even more. Now, with top bosses earning many millions, even he acknowledges the issue has to be addressed.

“Executives making as much as they do is another world for the guy in the street,” he says. Top pay in the US has gone beyond anything that is sensible, he says, and Britain, in trying to compete, cannot win. Bosses working in British companies are going to have to accept restraint.

But what about his own salaries? Married three times, and with homes in London, Connecticut and Maine, he has always played in the premier league. As BG chairman he earns £490,000 a year. He is also deputy chairman of Rio Tinto and a director of the US-based Georgia-Pacific Corporation. “My pay has always attracted magnetic media attention,” he shrugs, “but I don’t think it’s too much. As far as I’m concerned, I’ve earned it.”

And the numbers prove it: impressive shareholder-value increases in the old British Gas — £1,000 put into the shares at the end of 1996 would now be worth more than £2,500 — and indeed in BOC, where the compound annual share-price and market-value growth on Giordano’s watch, 1979-91, exceeded 20% a year.

More than that, talk to those who have worked with him and they will credit him with one of the great success stories in recent British business: reshaping the moribund British Gas into a string of more profitable, more competitive, better- focused firms.

“Dick took on a massive task; the original privatised company was an absolute disaster,” says Sir Stanley Kalms, Dixons’ founder, who sat on the appointments committee that picked Giordano, “and he turned it round quite brilliantly.”

How? Demerging the regulated parts so the core group could push on overseas, winnowing out a workforce that topped 100,000 (BG, concentrating on exploration and production, has fewer than 5,000 now), and bringing in fresh managers imbued with his vision. Varney, who was Giordano’s chief executive at BG, describes him as a consistent leader with very clear focus. “He combines great strategic insight with the detailed discipline of a lawyer.”