By SHIBANI MAHTANI

As alternative energy sources such as wind and solar power gain traction and investment, and volatility roils the global oil market, it might not be the sexiest time to be exploring for oil and gas.

Lionel Lee, managing director of Ezra Holdings Ltd., is confident in Ezra’s sustained growth. With its acquisition last year of Norwegian subsea specialist Aker Marine Contractors, a four-decade-old company, Ezra propelled itself into the ranks of major global players. The company, also known by its operating brand EMAS, now manages subsea-exploration projects for some of the world’s biggest oil companies, including BP

Exploration & Production. In the nine months following that acquisition, Mr. Lee said, Ezra acquired contracts of $850 million.

To be sure, the initial months following the $250 million acquisition were rough. Ezra’s earnings sank and its share price dropped, as it promised investors and shareholders that the long-term strategy—focused on expanding fleets of ships and their expertise to all corners where deep oil and gas reserves are found—will pay off. Mr. Lee told his investors that the company is built for the next 50 years, and encouraged them to be patient. The strategy seems to be paying off. The company’s shares, at 95 Singapore cents (76 U.S. cents) as recently as November, closed Friday at S$1.255. Earlier this month, CIMB Research upgraded the firm to outperform from underperform and raised its target price to S$1.40.

Mr. Lee spoke with Shibani Mahtani about changes within the industry and hiring the right people. The following interview has been edited.

WSJ: How did you expand from your headquarters in Singapore and establish regional bases in Texas and Norway?

Mr. Lee: Getting to know and understanding people based in Europe and the U.S. is key. I’ve literally grown up with the management team here in Singapore, and what I try to do in our regional centers is to understand my management team there. After a couple of years [in Houston], I understand how the management is run there and there’s been extremely good rapport.

When we wanted to grow globally, we did not have the choice of luxury or time. We acquired AMC, which was a 40-year-old company. If we were going to take the same amount of time to grow, we were not going to get the resources we needed to build up the company. We took the acquisition route, and it has paid off—it put us a step ahead of our competition in the region.

WSJ: What was the importance of expanding overseas so quickly?

Mr. Lee: Though we are based in Singapore, we have no clients at all here. Singapore has an excellent infrastructure, but only after being in the U.S. and Europe do you become a truly global oil and gas player. A lot of know-how is held there, so your engineering centers can be kept there. In Houston, you also have all your major oil companies in a 50-mile radius.

WSJ: How satisfied are you with Ezra’s performance since the 2011 acquisition?

Mr. Lee: Typically when you grow a business, you will have growing pains. Overall, I think we’ve done the best that we could’ve right now—our first-quarter profits have remained flat but our revenue has jumped 138% from a year earlier. Our profile is completely different from that of the previous year, our model is changing rapidly. Our revenue in particular is diversifying from the traditional Asian-Pacific region, where we were once primarily based.

WSJ: Is it difficult working for the company with your father as chairman?

Mr. Lee: The first one to tell me this was a mistake was my mother—she said working with my father was the worst thing I could ever do. Seventeen years ago, when I wanted to join the oil and gas industry, everyone thought I was crazy because it was thought to be a sunset industry.

It had a lot of challenges at first, because when I went home, I still had to face him. Even if I did not agree with his view, I still had to go home and respect him as my father. But when I was doing a job, I really wanted to execute it the way I myself wanted to. In the initial years, it was hard for us as a family. Still, I grew up with many of the crew members on the ships, and have known them for decades. This relationship has carried on, and has made the transition between the leadership of myself and my father easier.

WSJ: What do you look for in potential hires?

Mr. Lee: I look for people who share my passion for the industry. I still dream of ships, I still want to sleep and eat with the boats. I spend a lot of time at the shipyard, and miss the smell when I am away. It is important for new hires to share that—I like to see the sparkle in their eyes.

They don’t need to understand the business initially, but they need to want to learn and improve themselves. I look for the enthusiasm in them, and see if they can think of different ways to execute a project.

WSJ: What is the biggest challenge for the industry?

Mr. Lee: It is not increased regulation or risk, but rather getting the right people and fitting a square into a square. I like to work with my colleagues for decades and decades to come, but younger people move around a lot more. Trying to find the right successors is also extremely challenging, so we name them early and make sure there is enough time to train them.

We also recruit globally, from the U.S., Norway, Holland and of course here in Singapore, where we try to groom local graduates from the engineering schools.

WSJ: What drives young graduates to a company like Ezra?

Mr. Lee: When we [in this industry] were laying pipes in thousands of meters of water, people had not even been to the moon yet. Our operations are not just about ships, and are very complex—which is interesting.

Being a global organization, we are able to give all our people a global feel, and show them what different fields are like. You can be working in Brazil today, and the U.S. tomorrow, be exposed to Europe but trained in Asia-Pacific.

A lot of Europeans are also attracted to work in Singapore, because it is a great place to live. It is not difficult to attract people to this region. We may not be as exciting as a marketing company, but we have huge exposure in so many different countries.

I think we have gone past the stage where the oil and gas industry is a sunset industry; a lot of young engineers are attracted to this business because it is a need business, rather than a want.

I don’t need a new smartphone, but I need energy every day.

By JUDITH H. DOBRZYNSKI

Boston

Malcolm A. Rogers, the director of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, is remarkably relaxed, considering. In November, in one of autumn’s biggest cultural events, the museum will open an “Art of the Americas” wing, which not only expands its space by 28% and raises its profile exponentially, but which also, as Mr. Rogers puts it, is “central to my career.”

Mr. Rogers, a Briton who, hired by the MFA in 1994, raised $504 million for the whole revamp, considers it so meaningful, in fact, that he changed his nationality: “When I embarked on this wing, I became an American citizen, because how could I expect people to invest in it if I did not have a stake in it?”

That was in 2003, but the venture’s roots go back to at least 1999, when he controversially sacked a few veteran curators and merged several departments. He also began to hint that his new “Art of the Americas” megadepartment—which brought together paintings, decorative arts and antiquities from North, South and Central America—would one day fill a new building.

But Mr. Rogers took his time. “One lesson I learned from going around to other museums is that if you add a wing thoughtlessly, you can mess up the flow of the whole museum,” he says. He cites the MFA’s 1981 addition, designed by I.M. Pei for special exhibitions and contemporary art, as “way too successful. People didn’t go to the rest of the museum.”

To counter that, Mr. Rogers restored and reopened the museum’s historical entrances on the Fenway and on Huntington Avenue, which had been closed. And he hired London-based Foster + Partners to develop a master plan and design a new wing. “The brief was to complete the historical building and not upstage it,” he says. He did not want “a showy outside.”

Well, there were other parts of the brief, too. For one, Mr. Rogers wanted the new wing, which projects from the museum’s northeast side, to be transparent, and it is largely made of glass. That’s “so people outside can see people inside and know you don’t have to wear black tie to come in,” he explains. “I want us to be more approachable.”

The four-floor expansion, designed with the MFA’s 15,000-item Americas collection in mind, travels through time, from art dating to the first millennium B.C. on the lower-ground floor up to art through the 20th century on the top.

That chronological arrangement is conservative; thematic groupings are today considered more visitor friendly. Yet Mr. Rogers has mixed in a dose of iconoclasm, a tactic he has used before. In 1996, he gave celebrity photographer Herb Ritts his first museum show; the pictures of scantily clad Hollywood stars and models drew both thousands of people and buckets of criticism about dumbing down. “I wanted the controversy on purpose,” Mr. Rogers says, explaining it as outreach to younger generations even as he defended the artistry of the photographs. (Similar statements via exhibitions include “Dangerous Curves: The Art of the Guitar” in 2000 and “Speed, Style and Beauty: Cars From the Ralph Lauren Collection” in 2005.)

“I don’t feel the need to be controversial anymore,” he says with a smile, “but I want to do new things.”

With the Americas wing, his unorthodoxy is somewhat retro. It will contain more than 5,000 works of art, compared with 2,500 on display before. “The sheer profusion of what we are showing” sends a message, he believes. In general, American art (which for the MFA stops, and turns into contemporary art, around 1955) is not a big draw. Yet it is popular among Boston’s collectors, and represents a strategic choice for the MFA. “I wanted to do something that would express what an extraordinary country this was,” Mr. Rogers explains. “And I wanted to represent the whole of the Americas.”

The museum’s chestnuts—like John Singleton Copley’s “Paul Revere” and Joseph Stella’s “Old Brooklyn Bridge”—will still be on view. But the MFA has added to its trove and, more important, has gone into its rich storerooms.

One such glorious work plucked from storage is Thomas Sully’s “The Passage of the Delaware,” a view of George Washington, on a white horse, at the famous military turning point; it predates by 32 years Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze’s iconic 1851 “George Washington Crossing the Delaware” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Sully’s painting, acquired in 1903, has never been on view in its original gilt frame (now restored) or with other American paintings, because, at 12.2 feet by 17.25 feet, it never fit into MFA’s American galleries. Benjamin West’s “King Lear” and Copley’s “George IV When Prince of Wales” were likewise hidden away for lack of large-scale space. Two Victorian period rooms, acquired in 1977, are also making their debut, as are new items like a David Smith sculpture and a ceramic bowl painted by Jackson Pollock.

The galleries themselves vary, with wall colors shifting from light gray to deep blue to a flocked, red-and-gold wallpaper that re-creates a pattern from a home of John Hancock. Walking with me through them, Mr. Rogers comments: “It’s important to create a stage setting, and to do things differently in different galleries.”

Many—22 of 46 (there are also four “behind the scenes” galleries and three for rotating exhibits)—are what he calls “3-D,” meaning a mix of paintings, sculpture, decorative art, textiles, costumes and musical instruments. In the past, MFA segregated its galleries by media.

There are other statements as well. Mr. Rogers, who was deeply involved in the planning with Elliot Bostwick Davis, the wing’s curator, singles out a gallery for American Renaissance works by such artists as Abbott Thayer, Frank Duveneck and Edwin Austin Abbey. That’s an “in-your-face” move: “These are largely unfashionable works that I want to be fashionable again.”

Mr. Rogers also decreed that John Singer Sargent have a room of his own, filled with 28 works from all periods of his career, in all media, including his masterpiece “The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit.” “Sargent is so central to Boston, I wanted a ‘destination gallery’ for him,” he says.

Around the corner is an inspiration of Ms. Davis: a gallery devoted to works chronicling Americans on the Grand Tour and hung salon-style, covering the crimson cotton damask walls top to bottom. Others include a gallery that pits Winslow Homer against Thomas Eakins, one for Copley, one for abstract works and another for American Modernism.

Though hardly anything seems “missing” from the American art narrative, Mr. Rogers concedes that some parts are sketchy: “There are still collections out there that could still come and help us tell the story,” he says. And he’ll no doubt be wooing the owners. As he sees it, running a museum is like maintaining a monumental bridge: As soon as you finish painting it, you start all over at the opposite end.

Ms. Dobrzynski writes about the arts for the Journal and other publications. She blogs at www.artsjournal.com/realcleararts.

Por MAX COLCHESTER e DAVID ENRICH, de Londres

Os bancos europeus estão se preparando para uma onda de rebaixamentos em suas classificações de crédito nas próximas semanas que poderia intensificar a pressão sobre a já fragilizada indústria e ainda prejudicar os esforços recentes para aliviar a longa crise financeira que assola o Continente.

Sob pressão dos bancos, a Moody’s Investors Service informou na sexta-feira que está adiando até o início de maio sua muito aguardada decisão sobre a possibilidade de rebaixar as classificações de crédito de 114 bancos em 16 países europeus.

A Moody’s anunciou a revisão em fevereiro, dizendo que era necessária em função das fracas condições dos bancos e do ambiente difícil em que eles estão operando. Ela tinha planejado iniciar a divulgação dos resultados nesta semana.

A Moody’s informou em um comunicado que optou por “uma abordagem apropriadamente deliberada para esse processo de revisão e o concluirá quando estiver confiante de que toda a informação relevante foi recebida e processada.”

Embora a Moody’s não tenha revelado se vai rebaixar as classificações dos vários bancos, e em que grau o faria, funcionários de vários dos maiores bancos europeus disseram esperar que suas notas de crédito sejam empurradas pelo menos um degrau para baixo.

Os rebaixamentos iminentes dispararam uma corrida entre alguns credores e investidores, que temem que eles possam atiçar as brasas de uma crise latente.

Nas últimas semanas, à medida que a Moody’s se aproximava da conclusão de sua revisão, os grandes bancos tentaram convencer a agência de classificação a não os rebaixar em vários degraus, segundo pessoas a par do assunto.

Essa não é a primeira vez que os bancos europeus se veem diante de um rebaixamento de suas classificações de crédito. Desde que a crise financeira global estourou há quase cinco anos, a Moody’s e outras agências classificadoras, como a Standard & Poor’s, reduziram várias vezes suas notas para os bancos.

Mas esta nova rodada de rebaixamento — a primeira vez que a Moody’s considera uma redução em massa da classificação de crédito de bancos europeus — ocorre em um momento perigoso para a indústria financeira.

Muitos banqueiros e analistas esperavam que o pior já tivesse passado para setor — que foi golpeado por perdas com empréstimos inadimplentes e investimentos em arriscados títulos de dívida de governos europeus —, quando o Banco Central Europeu colocou recentemente cerca de 1 trilhão de euros em empréstimos de baixo custo de três anos para pelo menos 800 bancos. Esses empréstimos em grande parte eliminaram o risco de um colapso abrupto de um banco devido a problemas de liquidez.

Mas os benefícios proporcionados por esses empréstimos começaram a desvanecer-se. Em toda a Europa, as ações de bancos foram bombardeadas por preocupações renovadas sobre a saúde financeira da Europa — uma tendência que continuou na sexta-feira com uma acentuada queda nas ações de bancos espanhóis e italianos.

Um número crescente de analistas e investidores teme que os empréstimos do BCE tenham permitido que os bancos em dificuldades simplesmente atrasassem o processo doloroso de limpar seus balanços.

Como parte de suas revisões, a Moody’s está examinando o grau de dependência dos bancos dos empréstimos do BCE e “quais são as habilidades dos bancos de se desvencilharem desse financiamento”, disse uma pessoa a par do assunto.

Grandes empréstimos do BCE “geram a necessidade de uma fiscalização mais intensa” por parte da Moody’s sobre a saúde financeira dos bancos, disse essa pessoa.

Os custos associados com os rebaixamentos da Moody’s poderiam ser elevados, de acordo com documentos apresentados aos reguladores bancários e pessoas a par do assunto.

Classificações mais baixas podem levar instituições avessas ao risco a retirar seus depósitos de bancos. Além disso, os bancos provavelmente serão forçados a colocar garantia adicional em operações com derivativos e certos instrumentos de investimento, incluindo aqueles que agrupam créditos imobiliários securitizados, se suas classificações forem rebaixadas.

“Este é um problema sério para todos os bancos europeus, especialmente dos países periféricos”, disse o presidente de um grande banco europeu que espera ser rebaixado.

Por exemplo, o Deutsche Bank AG, informou em seu relatório anual mais recente que um rebaixamento de um grau em sua classificação de crédito poderá expor o banco a “uma lacuna de financiamento” de 45 bilhões de euros.

O banco alemão destacou ainda que teria uma abundância de recursos a sua disposição para preencher essa lacuna, caso haja um rebaixamento.

Um porta-voz da Deutsche Banco não quis comentar.

No Reino Unido, onde a Moody’s está examinando nove instituições bancárias para um potencial rebaixamento, o Royal Bank of Scotland Group PLC e Lloyds Banking Group PLC têm alertado seus investidores sobre a revisão à medida que se preparam para condições de financiamento mais desafiadoras, segundo pessoas a par do assunto.

O RBS alertou em alguns documentos apresentados aos reguladores recentemente que a apresentação de um rebaixamento de um grau pode requerer que o banco apresente um adicional de 12,5 bilhões de libras esterlinas (US$ 19,8 bilhões) em garantias. Um rebaixamento “poderia aumentar significativamente seus custos de empréstimos e limitar sua capacidade de emissão nos mercados de capitais”, disse o banco no documento.

O Lloyds divulgou recentemente que, se todas as grandes agências classificadoras rebaixarem sua classificação de crédito em dois graus, o banco poderia ter de apresentar um adicional de 28 bilhões de libras em garantias vinculadas a contratos financeiros com clientes e em financiamento garantido do banco. O banco também alertou que esses rebaixamentos “podem resultar em uma saída de 11 bilhões de libras do caixa”.

Tanto o RBS quanto o Lloyds, nos quais o governo do Reino Unido detém participação, têm grupos substanciais de ativos líquidos aos quais podem recorrem se suas fontes de financiamento tradicionais secarem.

Representantes de ambos os bancos se recusaram a comentar sobre a avaliação da Moody’s.

Alguns executivos do banco argumentam que o impacto dos rebaixamentos provavelmente será limitado.

Eles observam que a Moody’s está seguindo os passos de agências rivais Standard & Poor’s e Fitch Ratings, que já rebaixaram muitos dos bancos que agora estão sendo revisados pela Moody’s.

Além disso, dizem eles, investidores e clientes dos bancos tiveram tempo suficiente para antecipar os rebaixamentos e, portanto, não serão surpreendidos.

Those are some ugly details that our Kimberley Strassel has been turning up about the effort to smear Mitt Romney’s campaign donors. The dirt-digging exercise reflects the character of President Obama’s re-election campaign, as well as what’s really behind the drive for more “transparency” in political donations.

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Columnist Kim Strassel on President Obama’s enemies list. Photo: Associated Press

As Ms. Strassel has reported in recent columns, Idaho businessman Frank VanderSloot has become the target of a smear campaign since it was disclosed earlier this year that he had donated $1 million to a super PAC supporting Mr. Romney. President Obama’s campaign website teed him up in April as one of eight “less than reputable” Romney donors and a “bitter foe of the gay rights movement.” One sin: His wife donated to an anti-gay-marriage campaign, of the kind that have passed in 30 or so states.

Now we learn that little more than a week after that Presidential posting, a former Democratic Senate staffer called the courthouse in Mr. VanderSloot’s home town of Idaho Falls seeking his divorce records. Ms. Strassel traced the operative, Michael Wolf, to a Washington, D.C. outfit called Fusion GPS that says it is “a commercial research firm.”

Fusion GPS is run by a former Wall Street Journal reporter, Glenn Simpson, who wouldn’t say who is paying him for this high-minded slumming but said in an email that Mr. VanderSloot was a “legitimate” target because of “his record on gay issues.”

If Mr. Simpson and Democrats really favor disclosure, then surely Mr. Simpson should disclose who is paying him to rummage through the personal lives of opposition donors. Someone should also ask the White House, the Obama campaign and the Democratic National Committee if Mr. Simpson’s chop shop is on their payroll and if they approve of such tactics. Does Mr. Obama think the lifestyles and divorce records of campaign donors should be fair political game?

The attack on Mr. VanderSloot is also notable for its focus on his wife’s contribution to the anti-gay-marriage cause. Gay-marriage activists are winning the debate in much of the country, but as they do they are becoming more intolerant.

After California voters approved Proposition 8 banning same-sex marriage in 2008, opponents published the names of donors, who were later linked with zip codes and Google Maps. Donors reported getting death threats. Boycotts were set against businesses, and activists encouraged customers to call and harass business owners. Among the activists’ arguments for why Mr. VanderSloot is antigay is that his wife donated to the campaign for Proposition 8.

The fight over gay marriage is passionate because it concerns deeply held beliefs about religion, the role of the family and the human condition. Social mores like marriage that have held for thousands of years aren’t easily changed, and they should do so by consensus, not thuggery. If the political left is going to treat everyone who supports traditional marriage as bigots, and target them for personal smears, then we are in for another ugly run of the culture wars.

All of this is also a reason to reconsider rules that require the disclosure of political donations. This sounds appealing in theory, the Supreme Court has ruled that disclosure is Constitutional, and these columns have supported it as part of a political compromise that would allow unlimited donations.

But it’s increasingly clear that the real point of these disclosure laws is not to inform voters but to get donor names in order to intimidate them from participating in politics. The goal is to dispatch hired guns like Mr. Simpson on political opponents to trash their reputations.

Democrats and their left-wing allies should understand that Republicans and Mormons will not be the only targets. If Democrats think it is “legitimate” to prowl and publish the divorce records of Romney donors, no one should feign shock if some right-wing investigator is soon doing the same to Mr. Obama’s bundlers and super PAC donors. A President who claims to want “civility” in political discourse will reap what he sows if he plays by Nixonian rules.

A version of this article appeared May 12, 2012, on page A14 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: The President’s Hit List.