Posts from ‘August, 2009’

Aug. 28 (Bloomberg) — Shell Canada Ltd. said a regulatory agency’s approval of two oil sands mines in Alberta was upheld by an appeals court judge who rejected an environmental group’s request for a new hearing on the projects.

BY Jo Blow (real name and background information supplied)

Interesting round of discussion this morning!

Many Thanks,
Jo Blow

POSTING ON SHELL BLOG BY CLAIRE.A

Wow, just stumbled on this site and blog. Whilst I’m impressed with the way it has been set up and maintained, I’m amazed by two aspects: Firstly, those of you who work for Shell and are seemingly so disgruntled, why not just walk? You must be so unhappy in what you do to resort to these postings – so why not show some conviction and leave? I have heard that people who work at Shell tend to forget what the real world is like, but you can just leave you know and rejoin the real world out here! Secondly, to the Donnovans, I’ve just read some of the background and understand some of the history, but really, when are you going to live your lives?? Do you really want you gravestones to just say “had a pop at Shell for most of my life”.

Response from Guest1

Dear claire.a, your solution is a bit simplistic. If everyone walked away from something they did not like, there would be a lot of walking and not much improvement. Shell employees indeed have lived very sheltered lives. But that was for a reason: to be able to concentrate on doing a good job and living by the Business Principles of the group. But now, as the Donovans rightly keep pointing out, Shell has got into the hands of many bad people and it is very difficult to have those replaced. You could walk away, but you could also try to change the system. It has become very dangerous in Shell to voice a differing opinion so the ideas naturally find other ways to vent the anger that exists. There always are people who always complain, do nothing and are just frustrated. But this site provides an excellent open forum for any views (good or bad!) and I hope in the end it helps sort out Shell so it becomes again the decent company it was in years gone by. And that would be a good epithaph for the Donovans: ‘We devoted our lives to improve Shell’.

Response from John Donovan

Claire, Shell employees can best answer your first question (one has done so above). I know from insiders that some are disgruntled because executive directors have for years been pretending that they work within the Shell ethical code when Shell’s track record, including a multibillion dollar securities fraud, proves otherwise. I guess some are hoping for a return to an honest, competent, hypocrisy free management, which does show respect for employees, as promised in the code. The signs are far from encouraging.

As to our own situation, we do get some real satisfaction from our hobby, because from time to time, we are able to assist parties who approach us. The content of the email I received in November 2008 from the leader of Shell Ethiopia employees is self-explanatory. Regarding the tombstone epitaph, I feel sure Mr Richard Wiseman, the Chief Ethics & Compliance Officer of RDS Plc could make some suggestions. Alternatively former Shell/Sakhalin Energy Deputy Chairman General David Greer, is said to be good with words, unfortunately not always his own.

EMAIL FROM SHELL ETHIOPIA EMPLOYEES

Dear Mr. Donovan

Kind and warm greetings!

Today we have been advised by Shell Ethiopia Labour Union that the court case with Shell is settled through negotiation. We have forwarded the entire communication and scanned copy of the agreement in case you want to refer it. You will find it at the end of our message.

As per the agreement, Shell agreed to restore the previous early retirement scheme with some modification. The new scheme is “the old scheme minus 4 months salary”. We will use one of our collegues case (how he will be affected) to illustrate this:

- With the original (old) scheme he could have gotten up to 45 months salary,
- With the changed (new) scheme he would have gotten only 22 months salary.
- With the negotiated scheme, he would get 41 months salary

If you recall there were some employees that would lose as much as 70% due to the change in the scheme. Now this loss is reduced to 10%.

All affected employees in Shell Ethiopia highly recognize the role your web site played in promoting our cause. We strongly believe that this settlement would not have been possible had it not been for the intervention of your web site. For this, we would like to express our deepest gratitude on behalf of all Shell Ethiopia staff.

GOD bless and thank you again!

Shell Ethiopia employees

The partners will take a final decision on investment once they have production licenses and development approvals, Nicole Hodgson, Perth-based spokeswoman for Chevron said Aug. 26. Gorgon, which includes Royal Dutch Shell Plc, has contracts to supply the fuel to China, India and Japan and is among more than 12 LNG projects in the region competing for Asian buyers.

By John Donovan

If you would like to supply information or post comments on our website, but are concerned about protecting your anonymity, you can set up a free account with hushmail.com and then send information or comments to me at my hushmail email address: johndonovan@hushmail.com

The information would then be automatically encrypted and you would not need to post anything on royaldutchshellplc.com

Headline: Royaldutchshellplc.com site must bear responsibility for its actions: Extract from article: “We also have good reason to believe that many Shell employees welcome our activities, including publishing and circulating leaked information which senior management would prefer to cover up, or withhold from effected Shell stakeholders while negotiations with highly controversial third parties are in progress.”

Gorgon, one of the world’s biggest liquefied natural gas deve-lopments, cleared its final big regulatory hurdle yesterday when Australia’s federal government granted environmental approval for the $42bn project.

Shell in 2007 signed a “sales and purchase” agreement with PetroChina for Gorgon LNG, while Chevron has agreements with three Japanese utilities.

Full FT Article (Subscription)

EXTRACTS

Australia’s decision yesterday to grant the Gorgon gas project environmental approval may turn out to be one of the most significant events of 2009 for UK-based Royal Dutch Shell and its two US partners.

For Shell, which has LNG projects in Brunei, Malaysia and eastern Russia, Gorgon confirms the company’s position as a leader in Asian liquefied natural gas. It also draws a line under one of its darkest episodes.

Gorgon’s reserves made up a large piece of the in-correct regulatory reporting that plunged the company into crisis five years ago. Australia’s environmental ruling clears the way for Shell and the others to be able to book Gorgon’s reserves as proved, boosting an important measure by which investors judge the long-term viability of oil and gas companies.

Full FT Article (Subscription)

Associated Press

Supporters of a suit accusing Shell of complicity in rights abuses rallied in May. Shell denied wrongdoing.

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

Arcane Law Brings Conflicts From Overseas to U.S. Courts

August 27, 2009

By NATHAN KOPPEL

Victims of human-rights abuses around the world increasingly are seeking justice American style — by filing lawsuits against deep-pocketed defendants.

The Alien Tort Statute, a one-sentence law enacted in 1789 authorizing foreign nationals to file U.S. civil actions against those who violate “the law of nations,” has been used often in recent years to sue major companies for alleged complicity in crimes overseas, including torture and murder. Defendants need only to have regular business contacts with the U.S. to be vulnerable to lawsuits.

The litigation has proven controversial. Some legal experts claim that opportunistic plaintiffs’ lawyers have seized on the long-dormant law to enrich themselves. Knotty geopolitical issues, they say, are better left to Congress and the White House, not unelected federal judges. But human-rights lawyers counter that victims of abuses often can’t obtain justice in foreign courts, making alien tort suits their only recourse. Both sides agree on one thing: Courts increasingly are willing to consider alien-tort suits and to force companies to answer for their behavior overseas.

“Think of a troubled spot in the world, and it likely has given rise to alien tort litigation,” says Curtis Bradley, a Duke University School of Law professor.

In one of the most prominent recent cases, Royal Dutch Shell PLC paid $15.5 million in June to settle a lawsuit claiming it was complicit in the Nigerian government’s execution of activists who had protested Shell’s oil production in the country. Shell has denied wrongdoing.

The Alien Tort Statute was virtually a dead letter until 1980, when the Second U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Paraguayan citizens who resided in the U.S. could sue a Paraguayan police official who allegedly had kidnapped and tortured a family member of the plaintiffs in their home country. A trial judge later awarded the plaintiffs $10 million in damages.

The Second Circuit ruling sparked a surge in alien tort suits, but it wasn’t until the 1990s, lawyers say, that plaintiffs started targeting corporations, often under the theory that they aided foreign officials or third parties who committed abuses. In assessing liability, a key question can be whether companies assisted a foreign government that was known to violate human rights, says Joe Cyr, a New York lawyer who defends companies against alien tort claims. But the law is unclear, he adds, about what constitutes knowledge. “Is it enough to just read a newspaper or a blog that a particular sovereign is engaged in human-rights violations?” Mr. Cyr says. “Multinationals incur risks anytime they do business with anyone who has been accused of human-rights violations.”

Most federal districts now allow suits against corporations for the same types of human-rights violations that can be brought against individuals — torture, extrajudicial killings, slavery-like practices, war crimes, says Paul Hoffman, a Los Angeles attorney who specializes in filing alien tort suits.

Last month, a Los Angeles federal judge ruled that alien tort claims could be brought alleging that London-based Rio Tinto PLC engaged in mining operations on the island of Bougainville in Papua New Guinea that incited a 10-year civil war, during which thousands of civilians died. Rio Tinto denies the allegations.

And earlier this year, a New York federal judge allowed claims to move forward alleging that several major multinational companies, including General Motors Corp. and Ford Motor Co., aided and abetted human-rights violations by providing goods and services to South Africa’s apartheid regime. Ford declined to comment. In a statement, GM said the company “opposed apartheid and became a proactive corporate leader in expressing this stand.”

Thomas Niles, a former U.S. ambassador to Canada and Greece who is now the vice chairman of the United States Council for International Business, a pro-business group, says corporations are being used unfairly as a surrogate for foreign governments in these cases. “You can’t sue the government of Nigeria or South Africa because of sovereign immunity, so who are you going to sue? Companies, and they are sued essentially for being” in countries where human-rights violations occur.

Some legal experts raise a broader concern that alien tort litigation can interfere with American foreign policy. “I regularly heard from legal advisers and ambassadors that they were outraged that our federal courts were judging conduct in their country,” says John Bellinger III, the chief legal adviser to the U.S. Department of State from 2005 to early 2009.

But Congress has the authority to rein in alien-tort litigation and hasn’t done so, casting doubt that the litigation impinges on diplomatic interests, human-rights lawyers counter. If anything, alien tort suits improve America’s standing abroad, says Katherine Gallagher, an attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights, a New York-based nonprofit that files alien tort suits.

The suits, she says, “give people in foreign countries comfort that U.S. corporations and officials will abide by international standards and not go to different corners of the globe and exploit the local populations.”

Write to Nathan Koppel at nathan.koppel@wsj.com

Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page A11

SOURCE ARTICLE

royaldutchshellplc.com headline by John Donovan

Closure of the Shell Lubricants facility at the Port of Vicksburg will mean the loss of 24 jobs in the Mississippi River city.

The Dutch government aims to cut down on carbon dioxide emissions by developing Carbon Capture Storage or CCS. Royal Dutch Shell has plans to take on this government project but is delayed because of opposition from locals in the town of Barendrecht, a suburb of Rotterdam.