Posts under ‘Corporate Governance’

CNBC

Safety consultant goes viral for leaving Shell after a decade, says ‘core business’ is dangerous

Catherine Clifford: @IN/CATCLIFFORD/@CATCLIFFORD: PUBLISHED TUE, MAY 24 20224:30 PM EDT

• At 8:27 a.m. on Monday morning Caroline Dennett emailed 1,400 executives at the oil and gas conglomerate, Shell, to announce her resignation after 11 years doing safety consulting for the company through her firm, .
• Shell’s internal safety program is dubbed “Goal Zero” and its aim is to have “no harm and no leaks,” Dennett said. “The Goal Zero is honorable, but they don’t equate that to the harms that are being done on a massive scale,” she told CNBC.

At 8:27 a.m. on Monday morning, May 23, Caroline Dennett emailed 1,400 executives at the oil and gas conglomerate, Shell, to announce her resignation after 11 years working as a safety consultant.

Dennett, who is based near London, asked executives and management at Shell “to look in the mirror and ask themselves if they really believe their vision for more oil and gas extraction secures a safe future for humanity.” read more

“For Shell, the strategy is not risk free. The company was forced to issue a rare apology last month after its traders bought a single cargo of deeply discounted Russian Urals crude, triggering an outcry that included the Ukrainian foreign affairs minister accusing the company of profiting from Ukrainian blood.”: “The moral question awaits its reckoning.”

The Washington Post

The Backdoor That Keeps Russian Oil Flowing Into Europe

By Javier Blas | Bloomberg: 8 April 2022 read more

Allegations and Litigation Relating to Spymasters in Shell’s Corporate Security Department

By John Donovan

See below a self-explanatory email I sent yesterday to named senior executives at Shell.

It mentions the current momentous events at Royal Dutch Shell, although that is not the subject of the email. In that connection, I have not spotted any reference in current news coverage to the Dutch police raid at Shell’s current HQ in The Hague.

That astonishing development may have fuelled a growing feeling that the Dutch government has turned anti-Shell by allowing Nigerian and climate change litigation against Shell to proceed in the Dutch courts and tightening up Dutch tax regulations affecting Shell. read more

By John Donovan: 1st November 2021

Below are screenshots from the webpage generated this morning when performing a search for Royal Dutch Shell on Microsoft Bing.

The map section shows the Shell Centre HQ in London.

The contact section displays the address and telephone number.

The website address displayed is royaldutchshellplc.com and the various Shell images, including the main top left one (with the Nazi theme), all come from the royaldutchsellplc.com website.

Royaldutchshellplc.com is the top-level domain name for Royal Dutch Shell Plc which Shell failed to seize in legal proceedings many years ago. Shell now has to live with the consequences of losing the action. read more

Yet Another Shell Data Breach

FEBRUARY 2010 BREACH

WORLDS BIGGEST LEAK OF STAFF DATA AFFECTED OVER 176,000 SHELL EMPLOYEES AND CONTRACTORS

Contact 
details 
for 
over 176,000 
employees
 and
 contractors
 of
 Royal
 Dutch 
Shell
 reached John Donovan and some environmental
 and
 human
 rights
 groups,
 ostensibly
 from
 disaffected
 Shell staff
 calling 
for
 a “peaceful
 corporate
 revolution”
 at 
the
 company.

The 
database,
 from
 Shell’s
 internal
 directory contained
 names
 and
 telephone
 numbers
 for
 all
 the company’s
 workforce
 worldwide,
 including 
some
 home
 numbers. It 
was
 supplied
 to John Donovan with
 a
 170­ page
 covering
 note,
 explaining
 that
 it
 was 
being
 circulated 
by 
“116 concerned
 employees 
of 
Shell 
dispersed
 throughout 
the 
USA, 
the 
UK,
 and
 the
 Netherlands”,
 to highlight
 the
 harm 
done 
by 
the
 company’s 
operations 
in 
Nigeria. read more

Italy court acquits Eni and Shell in Nigerian corruption case

MILAN — A Milan court on Wednesday acquitted energy companies Eni and Royal Dutch Shell along with a series of past and present managers including Eni Chief Executive Claudio Descalzi in the oil industry’s biggest corruption scandal.

The sentence, read out in court by judge Marco Tremolada, comes more than three years after the trial first began and after a total of 74 hearings. He said the companies and defendants had been acquitted as there was no case to answer. read more

Farmers win damages in major case against oil giant over ecological damage in the Niger Delta

By Bart H. Meijer

AMSTERDAM, Jan 29 (Reuters) – A Dutch appeals court on Friday held Royal Dutch Shell’s Nigerian subsidiary responsible for multiple oil pipeline leaks in the Niger Delta and ordered it to pay unspecified damages to farmers, in a victory for environmentalists.

The case was brought in 2008 by four farmers and environmental group Friends of the Earth, seeking reparations for lost income from contaminated land and waterways in the region, the heart of Nigeria’s oil industry. read more

POSTING ON OUR SHELL BLOG: 2020/12/06 at 10:26 pm (UPDATED WITH RESPONSE FROM “LONDONLAD”)

Escaped from C16Atraz

There are many parallels to be drawn between Shell and the one unbeatable Manchester United. Both are now mid table. Weak manager, senior players who are arrogant and only play for money, and have got rid of their most hard working players. Shell better get used to mediocrity. It doesn’t care at all about climate change but Van Beurden will no doubt continue to sell more of the crown jewels to greenwash its reputation like the loony who heads BP. read more

Translation of an article published overnight by the Dutch news media organisation, nrc.nl

Of course, Shell knew about the corruption risk, the prosecutor said

Lawsuit over oil field In a dim Milanese bunker, Tuesday was worked towards the denouement in the corruption case against oil companies Shell and Eni. Prosecutor Fabio De Pasquale calls it “the perfect economic crime.”

Carola Houtekamer: July 21, 2020

The lawsuit revolves around the acquisition of rights to the oil field “OPL 245”, for which Shell and Eni paid $ 1.3 billion. Photo George Osodi / Getty read more

This 1988 Shell report, discovered by Jelmer Mommers of De Correspondent, shines light on what the company knew about climate science, its own role in driving global CO2 emissions, the range of potential political and social responses to a warming world.

The confidential report, “The Greenhouse Effect,” was authored by members of Shell’s Greenhouse Effect Working Group and based on a 1986 study, though the document reveals Shell was commissioning “greenhouse effect” reports as early as 1981. Report highlights include: read more

Nigeria: Malabu Scandal – Activists Kick As Italy Appoints Accused Official As ENI CEO

By Oladeinde Olawoyin

21 April 2020

The Italian government has re-nominated Claudio Descalzi as Chief Executive Officer of Eni, Italy’s largest multinational company and the country’s largest foreign oil producer in Africa.

Mr Descalzi is set to maintain the leadership role despite an ongoing criminal trial over corruption allegations surrounding the billion dollar 2011 acquisition by Shell and Eni of Nigeria’s OPL 245 oil license.

Italian prosecutors allege that the $1.1bn paid by Eni and their partner Shell for the OPL 245 licence was used to pay former Nigerian oil minister Dan Etete and was “intended for payment to a former Nigerian president, Goodluck Jonathan, members of the government, and other Nigerian public officials”. read more

3.3 THE “OPL 245” BRIBERY CASE

In 2018, Italian prosecutors brought a criminal case over the alleged involvement of Shell, and the Italian oil multinational Eni, in a 1.3 billion US dollar bribery scheme linked to the license of OPL 245. This is the name of one of Nigeria’s most valuable offshore oil blocks.

Thirteen individuals, including some current and former senior managers of Shell and the Italian oil company Eni, are currently on trial in Italy relating to how the two companies acquired the block in 2011.80 The defendants include both companies, a former Royal Dutch Shell Executive Board Member and two former MI6 agents who worked for Shell.81 read more

Esther Kiobel and Victoria Bera sit with their lawyer as a Dutch court hears the first arguments in an historic case against Shell, in which the oil giant stands accused of instigating a raft of horrifying human rights violations committed by the Nigerian government against the Ogoni people in the 1990s, on February 12, 2019 in The Hague, Netherlands. © Pierre Crom/Getty Images

 KIOBEL AND OTHERS V SHELL

Shell’s operations in the Niger Delta were first, and most effectively, put under the spotlight in the 1990s by Ken Saro-Wiwa, an acclaimed Nigerian writer. Saro-Wiwa led a community organisation in his home area, Ogoniland, called the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP). MOSOP said that while outsiders had grown rich on the oil that was pumped from under their soil, pollution from oil spills and gas flaring had, “led to the complete degradation of the Ogoni environment, turning our homeland into an ecological disaster.”10 read more

Posted by William Eddington on Jan 27th, 2020

Media stories about Royal Dutch Shell (LON:RDSA) have trended negative recently, according to InfoTrie Sentiment. The research firm ranks the sentiment of press coverage by reviewing more than six thousand news and blog sources in real time.

The firm ranks coverage of publicly-traded companies on a scale of negative five to positive five, with scores closest to five being the most favorable. Royal Dutch Shell earned a media sentiment score of -2.00 on their scale. read more

The featured extracts are from current customer reviews about Shell Energy posted on Trustpilot. Visit the Shell Energy page on Trustpilot to view all reviews in their entirety, positive and negative (and Shell Energy responses). Watch out for any fake reviews. Note the reoccurring theme in negative reviews; the difficulty in communicating with the company. Some typos, punctuation and grammar corrected for ease of reading. 

Harassed to pay a bill 3 days earlier than it’s actually due

I have an energy bill that is due 24th of January, however today (21st of January) I’m getting an SMS from this hideous company telling me to pay my bill already. The message says that the bill payment is due. Seriously? I was getting this before, but this is a new “record”… 3 days before the bill is due … STOP HARASSING ME.

Terrible Customer Service

First utility was an excellent company. Since they went over to Shell the customer service has gone rapidly downhill.

They have their business model completely wrong. Isn’t it interesting how they have a member of staff responding to each of these reviews yet they have no staff available to actually deal with customer’s queries? Something very wrong there. read more

Extracts from NIGERIA Africa Energy Intelligence article dated 07/01/2020

As an Italian court continues its probe into the award of Nigeria’s most promising offshore block, all those involved in the deal at Shell are no longer with the major.

These include the head of upstream at the time Malcolm Brinded, former general counsel Keith Ruddock and legal advisor for Africa Guus Klusener.

Shell’s political advisor and ex-MI6 John Copleston, who met with Etete on several occasions to discuss the OPL 245 deal in 2010, has left…

Another former MI6 agent, Guy Colegate, who had advised Shell during the OPL 245 talks from Nigeria, left to work for Heritage Oil in 2013… read more