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Shell is dark, corrupt and dirty?

UPDATED: UNDATED

Comment on Bill Campbell *article by “Concerned employee” (Confidential contact information supplied)

I share your sentiments wholeheartedly Bill. The company has been caught with its pants down, with senior staff most likely involved in kickbacks. How could this have got through the numerous assurance including Integrity teams, Auditors etc who all form part of the checks and balances to ensure this is easily picked up (particularly in Nigeria). Either the company is full of incompetence, or there has been a blind eye turned to such corruption. I say (a lot of) both. The amounts of money involved is not loose change. I say this problem is endemic in many of the hardship countries we do business in. Shell is dark, corrupt and dirty and I am beginning to question if I am working for a far more sinister company than I originally thought. And this is playing on my mind.

*Stunned and outraged by Shell’s denouncement of Peter Robinson 

RESPONSE FROM BILL CAMPBELL, RETIRED HSE GROUP AUDITOR, SHELL INTERNATIONAL

Concerned employee

Thank you for your comments. One of the observable symptoms of a corrupt and unethical organisation or individual is when it or they are critical of others whilst ignoring their own faults. Ben van Beurden may be, by all accounts, a nice man and perhaps the most competent chief executive RDS has had since the reserves crisis, but he exhibits a common failing that of shear hypocrisy. Remember, way back in those heady days of 1999, the first year coincidentally that the Company posted a negative reserves ratio, a younger Ben was one of a few aides de camp, protecting and assisting Phil Watts and masking this information at the time from shareholders, investors et al.

Spending many hours monk like entrenched in his office massaging the numbers, Watts did not make public our inability to legitimately post more reserves annually than the oil we were producing and this continued till it all spewed onto the streets in 2004.

I assume Ben was not stunned and outraged by his bosses behaviour, or his own, at the time. Nor it seems was he stunned and outraged by the behaviour of the despicable Malcolm Brinded both over offshore safety scandals re the operations of the Brent field, the avoidable fatalities and the subsequent cover-up, and later Brinded’s part as the main functionary in the development OPL 245 affair.

I do not know Peter Robinson, have no idea about his character but he was a colleague of van Beurden, he has perhaps a wife and family and it cannot be comfortable having your character so openly destroyed, and this being done in my eyes prematurely.

As far as we are aware no investigation by authorities is underway into Robinson, no charges are pending, for OML 46 no trial is awaited on the issues that have so stunned and outraged van Beurden.

On the other hand, whilst RDS generally wants the world to give it the benefit of the doubt over the OPL 245 affair, is very vocal its protestations of innocence, rightly so because there is a legal process awaited where guilt or innocence will be determined by a court of law, Peter Robinson by comparison is not given the same degree of latitude, not treated to the standards RDS wants to be treated, Robinson is essentially and metaphorically strung up legs jerking from the nearest tree.

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One Comment

  1. Bill Campbell says:

    Concerned employee

    Thank you for your comments. One of the observable symptoms of a corrupt and unethical organisation or individual is when it or they are critical of others whilst ignoring their own faults. Ben van Beurden may be, by all accounts, a nice man and perhaps the most competent chief executive RDS has had since the reserves crisis, but he exhibits a common failing that of shear hypocrisy. Remember, way back in those heady days of 1999, the first year coincidentally that the Company posted a negative reserves ratio, a younger Ben was one of a few aides de camp, protecting and assisting Phil Watts and masking this information at the time from shareholders, investors et al.

    Spending many hours monk like entrenched in his office massaging the numbers, Watts did not make public our inability to legitimately post more reserves annually than the oil we were producing and this continued till it all spewed onto the streets in 2004.

    I assume Ben was not stunned and outraged by his bosses behaviour, or his own, at the time. Nor it seems was he stunned and outraged by the behaviour of the despicable Malcolm Brinded both over offshore safety scandals re the operations of the Brent field, the avoidable fatalities and the subsequent cover-up, and later Brinded’s part as the main functionary in the development OPL 245 affair.

    I do not know Peter Robinson, have no idea about his character but he was a colleague of van Beurden, he has perhaps a wife and family and it cannot be comfortable having your character so openly destroyed, and this being done in my eyes prematurely.

    As far as we are aware no investigation by authorities is underway into Robinson, no charges are pending, for OML 46 no trial is awaited on the issues that have so stunned and outraged van Beurden.

    On the other hand, whilst RDS generally wants the world to give it the benefit of the doubt over the OPL 245 affair, is very vocal its protestations of innocence, rightly so because there is a legal process awaited where guilt or innocence will be determined by a court of law, Peter Robinson by comparison is not given the same degree of latitude, not treated to the standards RDS wants to be treated, Robinson is essentially and metaphorically strung up legs jerking from the nearest tree.

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