The successor to Christophe de Margerie, the outspoken Total SA (FP) boss who died in a Moscow plane crash, will have to contend with a slump in the company’s output and the failure of its exploration strategy. Patrick Pouyanne, currently the company’s refining chief and long-touted as a potential successor, will be nominated as chief executive officer at a board meeting in Paris today, Les Echos reported, without saying where it got the information. The new CEO must see through a round of cost cuts as lower oil prices and weak returns from refining eat into profit at France ’s largest company by sales. De Margerie, killed Oct. 20 when his private jet struck a snowplow on a Moscow runway, had sold older fields and sought to pare investments in new projects as part of a pledge to investors last month to cut $2 billion […]