Posts Tagged ‘Gale Norton’

*CORPORATE TERRORISM AGAINST A FORMER SHELL EMPLOYEE
*ROYAL DUTCH SHELL NAZI SECRETS EXPOSED
*INSPECTOR GENERAL REPORT: GALE NORTON, SHELL SCANDAL
*Shell employee guinea pigs in study of carcinogenic properties
*1000′s of Shell workers asked to reapply for their own jobs
*SEX, DRUGS & CORRUPTION IN USA SPONSORED BY SHELL
*ROYAL DUTCH SHELL NIGERIAN CORRUPTION SCANDAL
*WIKILEAKS: SHELL EMBEDDED SPIES IN NIGERIAN GOV
*Shell embedded spies in governments of Nigeria, Dubai and Iraq
*PDF ORIGINAL ARTICLE SHELL EMBEDDED SPIES IN NIGERIA
*SHELL SETTLES CLAIM FOR MURDER & TORTURE IN NIGERIA
*SHELL COMPLICITY IN NIGERIAN MURDER OF CIVILIANS
*UNLOVEABLE SHELL, THE GODDESS OF OIL (NIGERIA +)
*CLEAN-UP FOR NIGER DELTA AND SHELL’S REPUTATION
*Shell fueled Nigerian violence by paying rival militant gangs
*SHELL CHIEF HAD A PRIVATE ARMY (IN NIGERIA)
*SHELL PAYS $10 MILLION CORRUPTION FINE TO NIGERIANS
*SHELL ACCEPTS LIABILITY FOR TWO OIL SPILLS IN NIGERIA
*NIGER DELTA CRISIS THREATENED SHELL’S GLOBAL BRAND
*SHELL GLOBAL SPYING ON ITS OWN EMPLOYEES
*DEATH THREATS AGAINST SHELL WHISTLEBLOWERS?
*Irish Police investigate death threats to Shell whistleblowers
*SHELL “TOUCH F*** ALL” OIL RIG SAFETY CULTURE
*PAYBACK TIME FOR CORPORATE VILLAINS?
*SHELL HIDES ITS TRADING WITH FANATICAL IRANIAN REGIME
*SHELL HID TRADING IN IRAQ OIL IN VIOLATION OF EMBARGO
*SHELL IN BED WITH GADDAFI, STATE SPONSOR OF TERRORISM
*SHELL INVOLVEMENT IN AL-YAMAMAH OIL FOR ARMS SCANDAL
*ROYAL DUTCH SHELL WORLDS LARGEST “SPECULATOR”
*Shell accused of supporting Syrian regime
*Whistleblower accuses Shell of psychological torture
*Blood for oil? (The invasion of Iraq)
*Why is Shell still present and operating in Syria?
*SHELL EVEN DEFRAUDED ITS OWN SHAREHOLDERS
*IRREGULARITIES IN A SHELL TENDER PROCESS

SHELL IN NIGERIA

Shell’s horrendous track record in Nigeria includes embedding spies in the Nigerian government; paying rival militant gangs; engaging in corruption (not only in Nigeria); arming police spies; undercover activity using a private spy firm (Hakluyt) and associating Shell with murder and human rights abuses. Consequently questions inevitably arise about the background of the militants responsible for the attacks referred to in this article. Has Shell any financial connection with them currently, or in the past? Shell has such a shameful record in Nigeria, including plunder and pollution on an epic scale, that it has even considered ditching the Shell global brand name. Such a radical move would also distance the company from its Nazi past.

Royal Dutch Shell GUILTY of Mass Murder.

How Shell infiltrated Nigeria

The Military Beast -- Royal Dutch Shell

Controversy over Shell Corrib Gas Project in Ireland

By John Donovan

Although their names have been redacted, it appears from this report that John Hofmeister and Malcolm Brinded were both directly involved in negotiations/discussions with Gale Norton?

If the issue of Shell corruption is raised, based on our knowledge, there is always a good chance that Mr Big Brain, No Scruples  Brinded will be involved e.g. the “Touch F*** All” safety culture on North Sea Oil Rigs, his backing for a rigged Shell contract tender and now his interesting meeting in London with Gale Norton.

The Office of Inspector General approached me on this particular matter and at their request I supplied Shell internal documents for use in the investigation.  It was at about this time that Shell Oil recruited the services of a specialist unit partly staffed and funded by the FBI to try to cut off the flow of insider information and Shell internal emails etc from reaching me.

Ironic that while we were supplying one U.S. investigative agency with Shell insider information and documents at their request, another was brought in by Shell security to try to plug the leaks. They were unsuccessful.

INSPECTOR GENERAL REPORT ON GALE NORTON, SHELL SCANDAL – PART 1

INSPECTOR GENERAL REPORT ON GALE NORTON, SHELL SCANDAL – PART 2

INSPECTOR GENERAL REPORT ON GALE NORTON, SHELL SCANDAL – PART 3

We provided the results of our investigation to the U.S. Department of Justice, which declined criminal prosecution.

Determination from the U.S. Office of Government Ethics (OGE)

The Office of Inspector General concluded an investigation based on a complaint that Royal Dutch Shell (Shell) received preferential treatment during the awarding of oil shale Research, Development, and Demonstration (RDD) leases in 2005 and 2006 by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM). Since former Secretary Gale Norton subsequently secured employment with Shell, we expanded our investigation to consider her involvement…

“Ms. Norton was under investigation because there was (and still is) the ‘stench’ of corruption in the air regarding her conduct as DoI Secretary and the awarding of leases to Shell, followed by her eventual employment with Shell. Her departure from Shell indicates that Shell had no ‘further’ need for her services, and that she was a PR liability, if not a legal liability.”

John,

I read your article regarding Gale Norton’s lashing out at the investigation of her conduct in taking the job with RD Shell after leaving DoI.

Federal employees are all given ‘civilian’ employment ‘ethics’ counseling prior to exiting Federal Service. Furthermore, such counseling service is available for those who have exited and who might want take a position with a company where there might be a ‘conflict’, real or perceived.  These services were available to Ms. Norton from the DoI General Counsel’s office, or Inspector General’s Office, I am certain, and perhaps the Dept. of Justice as well. She could have availed herself of these services and sought an ‘official’ opinion from US government attorneys regarding employment with RD Shell.

I see no mention that Ms. Norton availed herself of the opportunity to seek such an opinion. I am certain that government attorneys would NOT have found that to be ‘ethical’, etc., and I presume that Ms. Norton was aware of this as well.

Ms. Norton was under investigation because there was (and still is) the ‘stench’ of corruption in the air regarding her conduct as DoI Secretary and the awarding of leases to Shell, followed by her eventual employment with Shell. Her departure from Shell indicates that Shell had no ‘further’ need for her services, and that she was a PR liability, if not a legal liability.

Taxpayers money was not wasted. That investigation serves notice to others who would seek to use their position as a political employee improperly to gain lucrative employment in the private sector after leaving government service that conduct which simply has the ‘appearance’ of impropriety will be investigated. That is, in and of itself, a strong deterrent to willful misconduct on the part of high officials.

I have no sympathy for Ms. Norton. She brought ordeal this on herself.

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

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

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

“It sounds like Secretary Norton was earning her salary from Shell even before they put her on the payroll,”

The Justice Department declined to file charges against Gale Norton.

“We found that Norton was very interested in the [Research, Development and Demonstration] program during her tenure as secretary, but we did not find evidence to conclusively determine that Norton violated conflict-of-interest laws, either pre- or post-employment, with Shell,” Acting Interior Department Inspector General Mary Kendall wrote in a letter accompanying a report obtained by POLITICO.

The IG found that after leaving Interior but before joining Shell, Norton “failed to fully describe her role in the leasing program” to department ethics officials.” After she was hired, Norton contacted the Pentagon and Interior’s Bureau of Land Management, “indirectly,” regarding oil shale issues.

Kendall referred to the report to the Justice Department, which declined to file charges. But despite the lack of federal charges, House Natural Resources Committee Chairman Nick Rahall (D-W.Va.) delivered a scathing verdict.

“It sounds like Secretary Norton was earning her salary from Shell even before they put her on the payroll,” Rahall said in a statement.

In her report, Kendall wrote that the Office of Government Ethics suggested that Norton “played a significant role in BLM’s oil shale program while secretary and noted that the former secretary’s participation in the program should subject her to the “lifetime ban on communicating with the federal government regarding the program.”

The IG also found that BLM “appeared to give preferential treatment” to Shell in two instances. In one case, two Shell bids were larger than the acreage allowed by BLM. In another, someone within the agency changed Shell’s numbers to comply with the requirements. Shell also submitted – and won – three bids – while other prospective bidders were allowed only one bid.

“We did not find evidence that Shell committed any criminal violation, but we did discover that someone in BLM provided Shell with information, which allowed Shell to submit a complete bid document on the same day that the Federal Register notice soliciting applications for leases was published,” Kendall wrote. “The next bid that BLM received came in 82 days later.”

An Interior spokeswoman said the department is reviewing the report. Shell’s U.S. operations did not immediately respond for comment.