Jim Ratcliffe and INEOS have been chipping away at BP for 30 years

INEOS chief executive Jim Ratcliffe knows BP well.

The entrepreneur has been picking away at the FTSE 100 company’s assets for nearly 30 years.

It started back in 1992 when Ratcliffe formed private equity firm Inspec with the sole purpose to buy BP’s chemical arm.

Inspec was later renamed INEOS and in 2005 the company bought Innovene and Grangemouth off the oiler for $9 billion ($7.2 billion).

He then went back to the well and bought the North Sea Forties Pipeline System and Kinneil Terminal in 2017.

Today INEOS got its hands on the rest of BP’s chemistry set, snapping up BP's aromatics and acetyls businesses for $5 billion.

Even for Ratcliffe - whose firm INEOS generates $85 billion in revenue - it is a blockbuster deal.

There’s only a couple of petrochemical assets left at BP, in Gelsenkirchen and Mulheim in Germany, and who’s to say BP boss Bernard Looney won’t sell them to him further down the line.

The deal also highlights how Looney and Ratcliffe are two men on very different paths.

Looney is conducting a green revolution at the traditional blue chip oiler in the middle of the coronavirus crisis.

He’s a good orator who sells dreams - as anybody who was in the audience at the Lancaster Hotel in February would testify to.

Whether he succeeds or not the process will be hard and in the public eye.

Ratcliffe is much more pragmatic. He doesn’t mind ugly, unfashionable assets so long as they turn a profit.

He’s the businessman even the most successful are envious of. A risk taker, who makes huge sums of money and looks like he’s having a pretty good time doing it.

A pint with Ratcliffe in the Grenadier in Knightsbridge - when he’s not in Switzerland or Monaco - is by all accounts a good time.