IF YOU are an arctic fox or a bearded seal caught in the wrong place at the wrong time, four or five barrels of sticky crude oil is quite enough to cause concern. But it is little short of astonishing to see one of the world’s largest oilfields closed after the detection of a spill of this size.

That is not to say BP has acted inappropriately. But the scale of the response may surprise those who assume oil companies are obdurately irresponsible. BP and others have advertised freely in recent years in attempts to bolster their green credentials. But is the public at large convinced? Most would doubt that the expressions of cleanliness went beyond well-intentioned desire.

That said, the oil giant is right to act quickly to minimise the risk of any sort of environmental damage. It is right because the natural environment is worth preserving for its own sake. But caution makes hard-nosed commercial sense as well. A stitch in time will save nine, said grandma. Some well-directed replacement of corroding sections of the Alaskan oil pipelines could save BP hundreds of millions of pounds in clean-up costs.

The reputational damage could be even greater. There could be some lost sales on the forecourt. But while consumer disgust will dissipate quickly, overtaken by the more immediate and more enduring desire for motorised personal transport, legislators and regulators may have longer memories. In the wake of another big slick, they may demand that the oil giants spend heavily on additional safety mechanisms to avoid future spills. Worse still, they may restrict companies from getting access to other hydrocarbon reserves. That would not just raise costs, it would halt the conduct of business altogether.

This is no unqualified success story for BP, however. It should not be so surprising to see the major do the right thing. It may also be argued that the company should not have allowed its infrastructure to get so creaky that a network closure was required. Environmentalists will ask why BP has taken risks with pollution. Revenues will suffer if the closure lasts long.

By the same token, if the passage of time suggests that BP has overreacted, it might struggle to retain convincing powers of persuasion in other spheres.

Four into more will not go

HAVING only four global accountancy firms is a problem that British and European regulators should have thought through when the merger of Price Waterhouse and Coopers & Lybrand was waved through eight years ago. Addressing it now is proving tricky.

Oxera, the consultancy commissioned by the Government and the Financial Reporting Council (FRC) after KPMG suffered a scare in America, did not offer solutions. The Association of British Insurers (ABI), however, is ready to think the unthinkable. “The threat of action by the competition authorities would,” the ABI says, “provide a strong incentive to the development of choice.” If competitors did not make a mark, the big four should be left in no doubt that “the authorities would require those with an excessive market share to divest a portion of their business”.

Splitting up PwC, KPMG, Deloitte or Ernst & Young would be impractical even if it ever became desirable. These are global firms. The UK could not act alone, even if the EU permitted it, because the merged firm could trade in the UK from other parts of the Union. Even an EU-wide split would be messy. One or both parts of the split entity might remain part of a global partnership. Action would also need to be fair between the big four, otherwise competition might become even more distorted.

A better solution might be to curb high market shares for a few years via the FRC’s code of governance. If companies were actively discouraged from hiring an auditor that already worked for a quarter of the top 350 companies, room would soon be made for a couple of the next tier to meld themselves into a firm able to compete on a national level, notably to audit the many top 350 companies whose operations are overwhelmingly in the UK.

MARTHA STEWART spent five months in jail and then five months under house arrest for acting on an inside tip from her broker and lying to a top lawyer, such was America's witch-hunting hysteria after millions lost their shirts when the dot-com bubble burst. But there is always another bureaucrat to insist on beating the humbled. So America's SEC has fined the television-styled guru £100,000, the loss she had avoided by following her broker's advice. It then banned her from being a director, being involved in audits, filing to the SEC or monitoring legal compliance. That sounds more like a reward than a penalty.

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