This article has been deleted at the request of Iain Percival.
RELATED CORRESPONDENCE ON SHELL BLOG
With unreserved apologies if you HAVE gotten his support: I find it very sad that you would decide to publish old documents from Iain, a man whose integrity and dignity you praise. His career concerns, his job applications etc are not something that should be shown around for cheap amusement, and to keep alive your anti-Shell moaning.
Yes this stuff was already in the public domain, but your explanation for publishing essentially says “it was hard to find, so I’ve made it easy for everyone to gawp at it”.
Take the document down, and show some dignity in return.
Again to repeat, if Iain is happy then I apologise, but if not, please remove it.
REPLY FROM JOHN DONOVAN: Hello Stuart. I sent an email to Iain immediately the article was published. I explained why, for legal reasons, I did not send it to him in advance. I offered to modify or delete the article if he so desired. I have now heard from him and honoured my offer to delete it. Since there was no legal issue in relation to Mr Bouman, I did contact him in advance and obtained his consent to publish. For the record, the article has been on the US Court records system for several years available to anyone willing to purchase a copy. Once it was posted online on 10 October 2007 the entire information, including the email correspondence, was no longer private but put into the public domain as a consequence of the litigation. The same applies even to documents marked strictly confidential. I was under no obligation to contact anyone. I obtained the document completely legitimately and was entitled to publish it and a related article without reference to anyone else. I contacted both gentleman out of respect for them. There are very few current or former Shell people who I would treat similarly.
This website and sisters royaldutchshellgroup.com, shellnazihistory.com, royaldutchshell.website, johndonovan.website, and shellnews.net, are owned by John Donovan. There is also a Wikipedia segment.
EBOOK TITLE: “SIR HENRI DETERDING AND THE NAZI HISTORY OF ROYAL DUTCH SHELL” – AVAILABLE ON AMAZON
EBOOK TITLE: “JOHN DONOVAN, SHELL’S NIGHTMARE: MY EPIC FEUD WITH THE UNSCRUPULOUS OIL GIANT ROYAL DUTCH SHELL” – AVAILABLE ON AMAZON.
EBOOK TITLE: “TOXIC FACTS ABOUT SHELL REMOVED FROM WIKIPEDIA: HOW SHELL BECAME THE MOST HATED BRAND IN THE WORLD” – AVAILABLE ON AMAZON.
Reference the article relating to Iain Percival that I removed at his request, after I offered to do so if he had any objection to its publication. I want to make it plain that the main focus of the article – the correspondence between Mr Percival and Mr Hans Bouman – both senior people at Shell at the time, was not private mail via their own email addresses, but Shell internal correspondence using their designated Shell email addresses. It is for this reason that it was included by Shell lawyers in Shell discovery documents that formed part of the relevant class action litigation process. It is no secret that this website has thrived over the last decade on publishing Shell internal documents and correspondence, whether leaked, obtained via SAR applications to Shell, or sourced from court records. As the activities of Wikileaks and Edward Snowden have shown, no one using the Internet or any Intranet can ever rely that any electronic communication, however confidential or sensitive, will not end up being published for all the world to see and as we now know, captured, analysed and stored in vast data centres by US and UK spooks.
OUTSIDER on Mar 12th, 2014 at 16:56
By definition any court record is in the public domain, so you are perfectly within your rights to publish anything that is available from the court system. Historically, obtaining the information was more difficult and required a visit to the court itself but the same rules applied.