Financial Times: Mudlark: ABB man to show and tell for Shell
“Royal Dutch Shell has gone Nordic again, this time to fill its top communications job. Björn Edlund from the Swiss-Swedish engineering group ABB will become vice-president for media and communications on October 1.”
Posted 13 Sept 2005
By Clay Harris
Published: September 12 2005
(EXTRACT RELATING TO SHELL)
Royal Dutch Shell has gone Nordic again, this time to fill its top communications job. Björn Edlund from the Swiss-Swedish engineering group ABB will become vice-president for media and communications on October 1. The Swede’s appointment, filling a plum vacancy in European corpcomms, follows Shell’s choice of a Finn, Nokia chief executive Jorma Ollila, as chairman from June next year.
Edlund will be reunited with chief financial officer Peter Voser, another ABB alumnus who came back to Shell in 2004. In charge of external and internal communications, he will report to Roxanne Decyk, head of a new corporate affairs directorate.
Mary Jo Jacobi, Shell’s current vice-president for external affairs, decided to leave the group, in part because she did not move from London to The Hague. (Mudlark, June 24). She this year was appointed a civil service commissioner and married Patrick Jephson, former private secretary to Diana, Princess of Wales.
Before ABB, Edlund, 55, ran a consultancy in Switzerland and was head of communications at the Swiss drugs group Sandoz. He was formerly a Reuters and UPI journalist.
The Shell that Edlund joins has one parallel to his current employer. It unified its corporate structure this summer, replacing an alliance of Dutch and UK companies that was nearly a century old. ABB was created by the merger in 1988 of Sweden’s Asea and the Swiss BBC Brown Boveri. It initially tried a dual structure, but finally unified in Sweden in 1999.
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