The Irish Times – Monday, December 13, 2010

LORNA SIGGINS

AN BORD Pleanála has said it is considering a request from a north Mayo community group to reopen the oral hearing into the Corrib gas pipeline.

The request was sent to the board late this week by community group Pobal Chill Chomáin, which is opposed to the new pipeline route on health, safety and environmental grounds.

The group’s spokesman John Monaghan said the request had been made because of what he claims to be serious irregularities in further information supplied by the lead developer, Shell EP Ireland (SEPIL), to the Department of the Environment for a foreshore licence application on October 26th.

The information for the foreshore application for a new pipeline route up Sruwaddacon estuary was submitted more than three weeks after the closure of An Bord Pleanála’s resumed oral hearing into the pipeline application – but differs significantly in some important details, Mr Monaghan said.

“This indicates that SEPIL have identified weaknesses in their own application that – worryingly – did not give rise to concerns from the authorities, including An Bord Pleanála,” his community group said.

“Much of the information provided recently was withheld from the planning hearings by both the Department of Energy and SEPIL, but is being presented as forming part of the planning process,” the group said.

“Clear references are made to the Health and Safety Authority (whose input was absent from the planning hearings) and to fundamental issues such as public safety, housing proximity and land-use planning,” the group said in its letter to the board.

“We are also drawing the board’s attention to the great disparity between SEPIL’s assertions in the new information given to the Department of the Environment, and their evidence on the very same issues given at the planning hearings in 2009 and 2010,” the group said.

It said it believed there was a real danger the board’s deliberations would “result in a project that has escaped full and proper scrutiny” unless the oral hearing was reopened.

An Bord Pleanála said it would consider the matter but could make no further comment at present.

It had been due to make a final ruling on the pipeline by the end of this year, along with a decision on compulsory acquisition orders for land.

Shell EP Ireland has confirmed that the further information was forwarded to the Department of the Environment’s foreshore section.

SOURCE

Photograph of senior Shell official Richard Wiseman, right, was kindly offered and supplied by him for display on this website.This happened when he was still fond of us.

LEAFLET DISTRIBUTED TO SHELL EMPLOYEES AT THE SHELL CENTRE LONDON TODAY, MONDAY 13 DECEMBER 2010

As notified in advance to Mr Richard Wiseman, Chief Ethics & Compliance Officer of Royal Dutch Shell Plc, we today distributed leaflets (example below) to Shell employees at the Shell Centre in London.

Within minutes of arriving, a Shell security guard tried to move us on. When we politely refused, explaining that we were on public property and had notified Mr Wiseman of our intention, the security guard said he had never heard of Richard Wiseman and that we were not allowed to remain outside the main staff entrance. When we again declined to leave, he reported to a colleague that three people were issuing leaflets. I advised him that only two of us were doing so, the third person was a journalist from a daily newspaper.

Shortly thereafter, the security guard returned and said there had been a misunderstanding. The presence of the press seemed to have made an impact. He was now very polite and apologetic. Soon a more senior security guard arrived and said that there was no problem provided we did not impede entry or exit by Shell employees. He said that he was aware that we visited every year and were never any trouble.

So our visit ended on a friendly note.

THE LEAFLET

Greetings from Alfred and John Donovan, owners of the website RoyalDutchShellPlc.com

2010 has been an eventful year for Shell and our controversial website. It started with us announcing the biggest breach of employee data in history by Shell and climaxed with our publication of the WikiLeaks cables exposing Shell’s infiltration of the Nigerian government.

As a result of applications made to Shell under the Data Protection Act, the company was legally obliged to supply us with Shell internal data held about us. Some information, such as the names of Shell employees, was redacted.

One email contained this endorsement by a hapless Shell official:

“John and Alfred Donovan well known in UK/Hague. They perceive Shell played them and so have made it their mission to embarrass, belittle and criticize Shell, which they do quite well. Their website, royaldutchshellplc.com is an excellent source of group news and comment and I recommend it far above what our own group internal comms puts out.”

Last week, we contacted Richard Wiseman, the Chief Ethics & Compliance Officer of Royal Dutch Shell asking if he was the author of the endorsement. We did not receive a response. At the time of the endorsement, Mr Wiseman was less hostile to our website than he is following our recent publication of “Royal Dutch Shell Nazi Secrets” containing evidence from independent reputable sources, that Shell conspired directly with Hitler, financed the Nazi party, was anti-Semitic and sold out its own Jewish employees.

Mr Wiseman even supplied us with a photograph of himself for display on the site. We apparently also have him to thank for the blunder that allowed us to obtain sole rights to the top level domain name for the merged company, which arose from the ashes of the reserves fraud: Royal Dutch Shell Plc.

Shell internal communications revealed that Shell had set up a counter-measures team to combat our activities. We also discovered that Shell Corporate Affairs Security (“CAS”) was engaged in a global spying operation against Shell employees designed to identity employees visiting or posting information on our website and expose individuals supplying us with leaked internal information.

The espionage operations against us involved a partly FBI funded and staffed specialist unit and was conducted on an undercover basis. The same basis as the earlier industrial espionage activity conducted against us by Shell and admitted in writing by then spymaster/Legal Director Richard Wiseman, over a decade ago.

At that time, Wiseman supported corrupt, predatory behaviour by Shell executives conspiring, with the help of Shell’s legal department, to steal IT property from smaller companies. It is ironic that in his new, “poacher turned gamekeeper” role, he travels the globe making anti-corruption speeches.

The counter-measures were not successful. Soon after discovering about the global spying operation, we received from a dissident group of Shell employees a leaked global address book containing business and personal information for over 177,000 employees and contractors working for Shell. In February 2010, the Shell employee database breach became a global news story. At the request of Mr Wiseman, who feared that the release of the information could imperil the safety of some employees, we destroyed the database.

More recently, we published numerous Shell internal emails supplied to us by a dissident group of Shell employees involved in the controversial Corrib Gas Project in Ireland. When Shell attempted to trace the people leaking the emails, death threats were allegedly made against Shell employees, which we reported to the Irish Police.

In June, we broke the news of the Shell settlement for $15.5 million of the US court case brought by relatives of Ken Saro-Wiwa. The settlement prevented evidence of Shell’s involvement in alleged murder, torture, and other human rights crimes, being heard in open court. However, on 9 November 2010, citing leaked Shell internal documents from the court case, the Guardian newspaper reported that Shell senior management was so concerned about potential reputational fallout from association with the judicial murder of Saro-Wiwa that it seriously contemplated changing the brand name to “New Shell”.

On 7 October 2010, we published an article: “U.S. Dept. of Defense Confirms NCIS Espionage Investigation of Shell”. Following email correspondence with a U.S. intelligence source, and clearance obtained by that source from Dept. of Defense attorneys, the source was authorized to confirm to us that an investigation directed at Shell Oil USA had indeed been initiated by the US Department of the Navy, Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS). Shell is alleged to have engaged in industrial espionage in an attempt to gain control over intellectual property owned by a former Shell Oil employee.

In November, we published a Cease and Desist Order imposed on Royal Dutch Shell by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission concerning bribery and corruption in Nigeria. Shell agreed to pay $48 million in civil and criminal fines.

Earlier this month, courtesy of WikilLeaks, we published secret U.S. cables revealing claims by Ann Pickard, then Shell’s Regional VP for Sub Sahara Africa, that Shell had infiltrated agents into every Nigerian ministry affecting its operations in Nigeria. Bearing in mind the recent news of Shell getting further into bed with the Russian mafia (the Russian government as defined in WikiLeaks cables), President Putin will be concerned about her request for help from US intelligence in relation to Gazprom, the controlling partner in Sak2.

Shell has also been in bed with a succession of corrupt Nigerian dictators and with leaders of militant groups attacking Shell installations. The attacks’, by coincidence or otherwise, seem to occur whenever the price of oil starts to fall.

A few days ago news broke that Shell Oil General Counsel Gale Norton has escaped prosecution on corruption charges, apparently due to an absence of “conclusive evidence”. The investigation revealed that Shell benefited from “irregularities” in the way oil leases were awarded when she was Interior Secretary in the George W. Bush government, just before joining Shell. Norton was asked to answer follow-up questions from the investigators, but “never responded”. An official report also said that on two separate occasions after she had left the Interior Department, Norton “failed to fully describe her role in the leasing program to DOI ethics officials.” The smell of corruption surrounding Shell Oil and Gale Norton continues. What happened to honesty, integrity and transparency?

WE WISH ALL SHELL EMPLOYEES A HAPPY CHRISTMAS & A NEW YEAR IN WHICH WE HOPE NONE OF YOU WILL BE COMPELLED TO REAPPLY FOR YOUR OWN JOBS.

Published by Alfred and John Donovan: December 2010

A Royal Dutch Shell Plc unit’s appeal of a $54 million punitive damage award was rejected by the U.S. Supreme Court. Photographer: Jason Alden/Bloomberg

By Greg Stohr – Dec 13, 2010 3:05 PM GMT+0000

The U.S. Supreme Court rejected a Royal Dutch Shell Plc unit’s appeal of a $54 million punitive damage award in a decades-old Oklahoma dispute over oil and gas profits.

Declining to consider putting tighter restrictions on damages, the justices today left intact an Oklahoma state court decision that said the award was within constitutional bounds.

The case stemmed from Shell’s failure from 1973 to 1985 to pay $750,000 to the owners of rights connected to an Oklahoma lease. The jury that considered the case added as much as 12 percent a year in interest, as allowed under an Oklahoma oil- and-gas statute, bringing the sum to $13 million. The jury then added the punitive damages for a total award of $67 million.

Shell’s appeal pointed to Supreme Court rulings that tie the constitutional limit for punitive awards to the amount awarded in so-called compensatory damages, those designed to pay people for the losses they suffered.

In upholding the award, an Oklahoma state appeals court classified the interest portion as compensatory damages. That meant the punitive award was about four times the compensatory damages — within constitutional boundaries, the court said.

Houston-based Shell Oil said in its appeal that the interest award was “functionally punitive” and shouldn’t have been used to justify adding even more damages.

Payment Incentive

The group suing Shell, led by Nancy Fuller Hebble, countered in court papers that Oklahoma set the interest rate at 12 percent to give producers an incentive to make payments on time and to provide compensation for the “time value of money.”

Hebble and her fellow litigants “would have earned greater returns had the money been distributed to them on time when the oil and gas was produced,” they argued.

Business groups urged the court to take up the Shell Oil Co. appeal, saying some state courts aren’t following Supreme Court rulings imposing constitutional limits on punitive damages.

“They have ignored the letter of the court’s rulings, their spirit or both,” the U.S. Chamber of Commerce argued in a court filing supporting Shell. “The result has turned punitive damage justice into a nationwide lottery game.”

The case is Shell Oil v. Hebble, 10-349.

To contact the reporter on this story: Greg Stohr in Washington at gstohr@bloomberg.net.

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Mark Silva at msilva34@bloomberg.net.

SOURCE

By Siobhan Hughes  Of DOW JONES NEWSWIRES: DECEMBER 12, 2010, 7:56 P.M. ET

WASHINGTON (Dow Jones)–Former U.S. Interior Secretary Gale Norton lashed out days after an inspector general’s report found “no conclusive evidence” that she had broken federal conflict-of-interest laws when she accepted a job at Royal Dutch Shell Plc (RDSA) after leaving her post in the Bush administration.

-By Siobhan Hughes; Dow Jones Newswires; siobhan.hughes; (202) 862-6654

WSJ SOURCE ARTICLE

Ian Fraser

12 Dec 2010

Scotland’s largest pension fund is considering disinvesting in Royal Bank of Scotland shares over concerns about poor environmental, social and corporate governance at the Edinburgh-based bank.

Strathclyde, which signed the UN Principles of Responsible Investment in 2008, is also considering disinvesting in other companies – including Gazprom, Petrobras, General Dynamics, Royal Dutch Shell, Bank of America – in its hall of shame. Most were considered to have performed worse than RBS in environmental, social and corporate governance (ESG).

FULL ARTICLE

The secret US cables which expose Shell’s infiltration of the supposedly sovereign Nigerian government.

WikiLeaks: NIGERIA: SHELL BRIEFS AMBASSADOR ON OIL GAS ISSUES

WikiLeaks: SHELL MD DISCUSSES THE STATUS OF THE PROPOSED PETROLEUM

WikiLeaks: NIGERIA: SHELL CLAIMS PRODUCTION UNAFFECTED BY ATTACKS

WikiLeaks: ROYAL DUTCH SHELL NIGERIAN SHAME

upstreamonline.com

The US Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation & Enforcement (BOEMRE) today said it would accept comment on Shell’s Beaufort Sea drilling plans until 23 December.

10 December 2010 17:19 GMT

The agency said it will accept submissions on the Anglo-Dutch supermajor’s oil spill prevention and contingency plans, as well as Shell’s proposals to contain any potential blowout, and on worst-case discharge scenarios independently calculated by government staff.

Shell had asked the agency to approve a drilling permit by the end of this month so it can push ahead with plans to drill during the Alaskan summer drilling window.

Environmentalists oppose the plan, claiming exploration places the Arctic environment at serious risk.

BOEMRE head Michael Bromwich has said the regulators will not rush a decision about the permit.

SOURCE ARTICLE

The administration announced last week that it would continue to ban drilling offshore in the Eastern Gulf of Mexico and in the Atlantic Ocean, but it would let some drilling move ahead, including in the Arctic. But, officials including Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, made it clear they would look carefully at Shell’s proposal for the Beaufort.

DECEMBER 10, 2010

By Stephen Power and Siobhan Hughes

WASHINGTON (Dow Jones)–The federal agency that controls oil and natural gas production on U.S.-owned land “appeared to give preferential treatment” to Royal Dutch Shell PLC when the company was pursuing leases to drill on tracts of government-owned land in the western U.S. in 2005 and 2006, the acting inspector general of the Interior Department said in a report Friday.

The preferential treatment helped Shell obtain the leases and “disadvantaged” the company’s competitors, according to the acting inspector general’s report. But investigators say they found no evidence that Shell broke the law, and “no conclusive evidence” that then-Interior Secretary Gale Norton–who accepted a job with Shell several months after leaving her government post–broke federal conflict-of-interest laws.

Shell did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The Interior Department’s inspector general’s office had referred the matter to the Justice Department, which declined criminal prosecution, the report said. A Justice Department spokeswoman declined to comment. Interior spokespeople did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Norton, contacted through Shell, did not respond to a request for comment.

The findings appear to mark the end of a multi-year investigation by the inspector general’s office into Norton, who was interior secretary from 2001 until 2006 under then-President George W. Bush and a champion of expanding domestic production of petroleum.

In early 2006, Ms. Norton’s department awarded several tracts of federal land to Shell for shale exploration in the western U.S. Later that year, Ms. Norton joined Shell as an attorney specializing in unconventional oils. Two years later, the inspector general of the Interior Department opened an investigation into the lease sales, prompted by a complaint from a Utah entrepreneur who alleged several irregularities in the way the sale was handled by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management and that Norton’s hiring by Shell after the sale was not coincidental.

The entrepreneur wasn’t identified in the report, but the acting inspector general found that some of the entrepreneur’s allegations were correct. In a report published Friday, the acting inspector general, Mary Kendall, said Shell benefited from several “irregularities” in the way the leases were awarded. The company submitted three bids, all of which were successful, while other companies were told by employees of the U.S. Bureau of Land Management that they could only submit one bid, Kendall’s report said.

Also, two of Shell’s bids exceeded the maximum acreage amount allowed under the rules governing the lease sale. Nevertheless, BLM employees “changed those amounts so they would comply with” the rules, according to the report.

The BLM employees were not identified by name. The acting inspector general’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

The report also says that an unidentified BLM official provided Shell with “advance information” that allowed the company to submit a complete bid document to the agency on the same day that the agency published a notice soliciting application for the leases. Shell ultimately won three of six leases, giving the company access to “a considerable amount of federal oil shale with significant potential value,” the report said.

Norton attended meetings or was briefed on oil shale in 12 instances in 2005 and 2006, the report found. In one instance, two weeks after a briefing with Norton, a BLM senior advisor circulated a draft notice soliciting applications for shale leases and told employees to respond quickly as “the secretary wants this out as quickly as possible,” the report found.

The U.S. Office of Government Ethics ultimately concluded that Norton had “played a significant role” in the oil-shale program while secretary and said that her “participation in the program should subject her to the lifetime ban on communicating with the federal government regarding the program,” the report said.

The report also said that on two separate occasions after she had left the Interior Department, Norton “failed to fully describe her role in the leasing program to DOI ethics officials.” One Interior ethics official wrote Norton in an email that “the permanent ban might not apply based on your description of how you were involved in this issue while Secretary,” according to the report. The ethics official also asked Norton follow-up questions, but Norton “never responded,” the report said.

-By Stephen Power and Siobhan Hughes; (202) 862-6654; siobhan.hughes@dowjones.com

SOURCE ARTICLE