In the know

Bet of the day

Has the oil price gone too far? BetsForTraders.com offers odds of 2-1 that BP’s share price, up 6½p at 619½p, will fall below 605p in five market days. Bets on BP and Shell have been the most popular so far, the bookie for traders reports. With 76 per cent of clients betting on BP’s price falling, does it mean that oil’s relentless rise is coming to an end?

http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/markets/article3920115.ece

Royal Dutch Shell has apparently caved into political pressure from the US in backing out of a $10 billion gas project in Iran.

To maintain its present capacity of about four million barrels of crude oil per day — representing about 5 per cent of daily global output — Iran is pinning its hopes on the development of huge new fields and is in talks with big Western oil companies, including Shell and Total. However, those companies are under mounting political pressure from the United States to withdraw from those negotiations.

…a Royal Dutch Shell base was bombed in the state of Bayelsa at the weekend. Attacks by the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta have raised the price of oil to a record $122 (£62) a barrel.

Let’s be honest: privately, we would rather that BP or Shell got the oil deal than did some less friendly Russian or Chinese company. If the price for petrol is an under-the-table payment to a dictator, so be it.

Even oil giant Shell, which last week reported record first-quarter profits of $7.8 billion (£3.9billion) admitted that it did not know why prices had shot up to their current levels, because there was no real shortage of supply.

SOME of the biggest names in British business have told Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling that Britain risks a corporate exodus if Treasury tax proposals on foreign earnings go ahead.
The delegation included… Shell chief executive Jeroen van der Veer and BP chairman Peter Sutherland.

Jeroen van der Veer, chief executive of Royal Dutch Shell, says that the proposed European Union scheme to force companies to pay for carbon emission permits — previously handed out free — threatens to destroy Europe’s petrochemical and refining industries. Mr van der Veer, whose company made a profit of $27.6 billion last year, thinks that the proposals would harm his “struggling” industry

In typical elephantine fashion, Shell poked its head through the window of the Government’s green tuck-shop, sniffed at the range of renewable goods on offer and is now trying clumsily to back out, pulling the window off its hinges in the process.