By LAURA CHESTERS FOR THE DAILY MAIL
Royal Dutch Shell is planning a £20bn sell-off of assets to create a leaner oil giant after its £47bn swoop for rival BG Group.
Shell has snapped up BG to expand its liquefied natural gas business and Brazilian deepwater wells but the deal also creates a sprawling £200bn behemoth that will need to be cut down to size.
Shell’s chief executive Ben van Beurden said he ‘will reshape the combined portfolio’ to create a ‘more focused company in a volatile oil price world’.
The Anglo-Dutch giant is expected to slash jobs and spending and confirmed the deal will enable £670m of operational savings, £1bn of exploration savings and a total cut in spending to less than £27bn. But fears it has paid too much for its rival spooked investors and it shed £4.6bn in value as shares slumped almost 9 per cent to close down 189p at 2019.5p.
After all the fuss over the appointment and fat cat pay for Helge Lund, the new chief executive of BG, one must wonder why chairman Andrew Gould bothered.
The future of BP as an independent company was thrown into doubt yesterday as analysts said BG’s takeover will prompt a wave of consolidation in the struggling sector.
BG Group is facing a fresh investor backlash over executive pay in the wake of oil giant Royal Dutch Shell’s £47billion takeover offer.
11 April 2015
Corporate espionage: Shell Cloak and Dagger activities spanning more than two decades – much of it directed against me 
Extracts from an article by 
News of the merger led to job fears. In the UK Shell has around 6,500 staff while BG employs around 1,600. Shell is in the process of laying off 500 people at its North Sea operations where old oil fields are becoming too expensive to operate.
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