Posts under ‘The Times’

The company has agreed terms for a ten-year lease with Canary Wharf on 200,000 sq ft of Docklands offices

February 24, 2010

A view of the London Eye, located along the Thames River at County Hall, is seen across from the Shell Oil Centre building.

Carl Mortished, World Business Editor

Staff at Royal Dutch Shell will be moved next year from the Shell Centre at Waterloo to Canary Wharf as part of a huge redevelopment of the oil company’s historic London headquarters.

The company has agreed terms for a ten-year lease with Canary Wharf on 200,000 sq ft of Docklands offices at 40 Bank Street, a building close to the tower at One Canada Square.

About 2,000 employees are expected to make the move eastwards as Shell embarks on a huge property investment in Central London with the construction of new office buildings, a project that is expected to last a decade.

The search for alternative accommodation, conducted in secrecy by CB Richard Ellis, was given the code-name Project Thunderbird.

The decision to decant staff to Docklands marks the end of almost ten years of deliberation, false starts and setbacks by Shell as it tried to get a grip on its 50-year endowment of almost seven acres of valuable London real estate, including a 24-storey office tower on the Thames opposite the Palace of Westminster.

A spokeswoman for Shell confirmed yesterday that it was negotiating a deal on 200,000 sq ft at Bank Street. She said that the decade-long move by staff to Canary Wharf was “temporary” while the company redeveloped the low-rise buildings adjacent to the tower.

“Shell has no permanent plans to leave the tower building on the South Bank and will remain a major employer in the area with established connections to the local community,” the spokeswoman said.

Shell’s move to Docklands coincides with another round of cost-cutting by Peter Voser, the new chief executive. He has made his mark as a relentless pruner and trimmer of overheads since taking over from Jeroen van der Veer last year.

The recession took its toll on Shell’s profits in the fourth quarter of 2009 and Mr Voser’s response was to announce a drive for a further $1 billion (£650 million) in savings.

Periodic bouts of internal costcutting and the removal of layers of imperial bureaucracy led to the gradual attrition of Shell’s head office staff during the 1990s.

Shell Centre, next to the then neglected South Bank arts complex, became a windswept wasteland, the public spaces populated by skateboarders and the homeless. The staff bloodletting opened up opportunities for the company to exploit its huge land bank in the centre of London.

It first sold off the White House, one of the downstream low-rise buildings, to residential property developers. Then it drew up plans to convert the ground floor and subterranean levels of the Shell Centre Tower into a leisure and retail complex. The oil company joined forces with Lend Lease, the Australian developer, to bring the project, a 600,000 sq ft design by Arup, to fruition.

However, Shell’s real estate dreams fell foul of local politics in a London borough that had earned a reputation as a property developer’s graveyard.

Lambeth Council scuppered the project, complaining that it was too big and that Shell’s vast retail ambitions would have a negative effect on Lower Marsh Street, a small shopping alley behind Waterloo station.

Shell has yet to choose a new partner for its revived real estate dream and some in the property industry speculate that it might be tempted to sell the site if values recover strongly during the decade-long hiatus of development.

Shell Centre opened in 1963 after six years of construction and contained all the accoutrements of a more paternalistic era.

To accommodate the needs of 5,000 staff, the floors beneath the tower contained a travel agency, a bank, a hairdresser, restaurants and bars, a giant sports hall and gymnasium, a cinema and a near-Olympic size swimming pool.

• Shell investigates posting of personal data

• Shell HQ might be redeveloped

• Shell to cut 1,000 jobs and close six refineries

TIMES SOURCE ARTICLE

TNK-BP and BP declined to comment yesterday on the decision from RosPrirodNadzor, which was reminiscent of the manouvering by Russian agencies that resulted in Shell losing control of its Sakhalin project in the Russian Far East in 2006.

The Times
February 17, 2010

Robin Pagnamenta and Robert Lindsay

Royal Dutch Shell said that it would freeze the salaries of its top directors and reform a generous bonus scheme as the oil giant moved to soothe shareholders’ anger over excessive boardroom pay before its annual meeting.

In a letter to investors, Hans Wijers, the new chairman of the Anglo-Dutch company’s remuneration committee, said that the changes were being made after extensive talks with shareholders, 60 per cent of whom voted down the executive pay plans at a stormy annual meeting last year.

The shareholder revolt triggered the resignation of Sir Peter Job, Mr Wijers’s predecessor.

In the letter, Mr Wijers said that Shell would be capping the salaries of its top three executives — Peter Voser, chief executive, Simon Henry, finance director, and Malcolm Brinded, head of exploration — until 2011. He said that Mr Voser had been appointed last July on a salary 20 per cent lower than that of his predecessor, Jeroen van der Veer, who earned $2 million (£1.3 million) in basic pay in 2008 but $15 million in total compensation. Mr Wijers said that Mr Voser and Mr Henry had received pay rises last year but only because they had been promoted to new roles

He also announced plans to scrap a heavily criticised bonus scheme that last year allowed top directors to collect multimillion-pound payouts, even though they failed to meet performance targets.

“I believe it is appropriate in the current economic environment to state up front that no upward discretion will be applied to the Long Term Incentive Plan or Deferred Bonus Plan vesting in 2010. In future, there will be no use of upward discretion in the vesting of these plans without prior shareholder engagement,” Mr Wijers said.

Meanwhile, in an unprecedented move for a global oil group, Mr Wijers unveiled plans to link bonus payouts to Shell’s performance on the Dow Jones Sustainability Index, which ranks corporate performance using a variety of social and environmental indicators, including cuts to carbon emissions.

From 2010, 10 per cent of the targets used to calculate payouts will be linked to the index, with the remaining 90 per cent related to operational and financial performance as well as the delivery of big projects on time and on budget. The key measure in Shell’s bonus plan remains the group’s performance against its peers — BP, Total, ExxonMobil and Chevron.

In another concession to investors, Mr Wijers said that in future Shell’s chief executive would be obliged to have shares in the company equivalent to three times his basic salary, in order “to provide greater alignment with shareholder interests”. The existing guidelines for executive directors are for a holding of two times salary.

Shell’s 2010 annual meeting will be held on May 18.

TIMES ARTICLE

TONY HAYWARD, BP’s chief executive, has set the FTSE 100 oil group on a collision course with investors and environmentalists over a blockbuster oil sands deal.

A company funded by the charitable arm of Royal Dutch Shell, the oil giant, has developed a cheap and efficient stove that it says could save carbon and lives.

PETER VOSER, chief executive of Royal Dutch Shell, is selling $10 billion (£6.4 billion) of assets as part of his drive to revitalise the oil giant.

The Times
February 13, 2010

The leaked list includes the names and telephone numbers of 170,000 staff

Robin Pagnamenta, Energy Editor

A full-scale investigation was under way last night into a security breach at Royal Dutch Shell as the oil company faced explaining to staff how the personal details of 170,000 employees and contractors had made their way on to the internet.

The Times has learnt that seven non-governmental organisations (NGOs) who were e-mailed a database of all Shell staff this month have been dragged into the row.

Shell has contacted all the groups — which include Greenpeace’s American office, Earthrights, Justice in Nigeria Now, Shell Guilty, Friends of the Earth (Netherlands), Remember Sarowiwa and CCR Justice — with a demand that they delete the database or face legal action under the UK Data Protection Act.

The list includes names, telephone numbers and other details of employees and contractors working for Shell worldwide. A small number of personal addresses were included in the list, which was leaked to the NGOs and to an anti-Shell website, Royaldutchshellplc.com, in an apparent attempt to highlight Shell’s activities in Nigeria and to call for changes to company policy in the country.

A Shell statement said: “We will investigate this matter and comply with all legal requirements in relation to this issue.” Shell confirmed that its security department had launched an internal investigation into the affair and was working to ensure that no further breaches were possible.

John Donovan, one of the creators of the Royaldutchshellplc website, which has become a focus for attacks on the Anglo-Dutch oil company for several years, said that he had threatened to publish the database on his website. He said that he had chosen not to after an exchange of e-mails, during which Shell advised him that to do so would be a criminal offence.

The security breach at Shell has emerged two months before the introduction of new rules that will mean companies could be fined up to £500,000 if they are reckless with personal information. The Information Commissioner’s Office, which has regulatory responsibility for data breaches, said yesterday that the ICO was “aware of the incident”. From April 6, the ICO will have the power to levy fines on companies that suffer similar leaks.

A spokesman for Greenpeace said that the database appeared to have been sent to a number of the NGO’s staff in the United States.

Shell added that it did not believe that a lengthy cover letter attached to the database, which was alleged to have come from more than 100 of the company’s own staff, was genuine.

Yesterday Shell sought to play down the leak. A statement said: “Certain data concerning Shell employees and other individuals on our internal address list has been disclosed to some external parties. The data is mainly business-related.”

A spokesman for BP said that it never discussed security issues.

Data protection duty

Under the Data Protection Act, companies are obliged to keep employees’ data secure by having up-to-date security. It should not be sent to other countries unless they have adequate protection.

The Information Commissioner’s power to punish companies in breach is limited. Fines for failing to protect against loss of personal data tend to be under £5,000. However, in financial services, the Financial Services Authority can punish failure to protect data; it fined HSBC £3.2 million for not taking adequate steps to prevent clients’ details being lost or stolen.

New laws are being considered for the Information Commissioner to punish companies in cases of loss of personal data for failing to have adequate measures in place. Fines could reach £500,000.

Shell would escape liabilty if the breach were found to be a result not of carelessness but of work by sophisticated operators beating controls. Those people, if found, could face criminal prosecution.

TIMES ARTICLE

The database featured a letter that set out criticism of Shell’s activities in Nigeria

The Times
February 12, 2010
Robin Pagnamenta, Energy Editor

From The Times
February 5, 2010

In his fascinating new book about his life and long career at BP, Lord Browne reveals he had talks with Jeroen van der Veer in 2004 about a merger with Shell.

The idea was to combine the two companies and to dispose of all BP’s refining and marketing operations. Lord Browne says it seemed “so obviously right to me and the executive team”.

But some BP directors took a different view and the proposal was never discussed by the board.

In retrospect, such a deal would not have addressed the key challenge both companies now face — access to reserves. And while Lord Browne says it would have yielded cost savings of $9 billion, results from both companies this week have shown there was huge scope for efficiency savings even without a merger.

Lord Browne’s book also details the extraordinary story of BP’s expansion in Russia. And in a frank and moving extract we will publish tomorrow, he reveals how he was forced to step down early after lying to a court about his private life.

SOURCE ARTICLE

The Sunday Times