SHELL GAME: SATIRICAL CHRONICLE OF OIL, SPIES AND THE DONOVAN’S

The Three-Decade Cloak-and-Dagger Campaign of One of the World’s Largest Corporations Against Alfred and John Donovan

Researched and Compiled: March 2026. Source material drawn from johndonovan.website Chapters 5, 12, 13 & 14, royaldutchshellplc.com, Reuters, The Sunday Times, The Financial Times, and the sworn court record.

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EDITOR’S NOTE

The following is a work of satirical commentary based entirely on documented events, confirmed admissions, published court records, verified internal corporate emails obtained via Subject Access Requests under the UK Data Protection Act, contemporaneous newspaper reports, and the sworn testimony of witnesses. Every named incident described herein has a paper trail. Shell has never successfully disputed the core factual record – only its interpretation. The satirical framing is the author’s own. The facts are Shell’s.

A note on the subject himself: John Donovan has stated publicly that he does not have direct evidence that Hakluyt & Company was involved in his specific case -” only a strong suspicion, based on circumstantial evidence he regards as substantial. That distinction is respected throughout this article. He has also stated that he remains open to cooperating with Shell to establish a set of mutually agreed facts.

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PART ONE: HOW TO MAKE ENEMIES AND SPEND MILLIONS DOING IT

The World’s Most Expensive Grudge Match Begins with a Petrol Station Game

In the early 1980s, a marketing man in Suffolk named John Donovan walked into Shell’s offices with a rather clever idea for a forecourt promotion. Shell liked it. Shell ran it. Shell made a great deal of money from it. So far, so ordinary. The peculiar part came later, when Shell apparently decided that the most efficient way to handle the man who had given them their lucrative ‘Make Money’ promotion game was to spend the next four decades, many millions of pounds, and the combined intellectual resources of former MI6 officers, the FBI, cyber forensics agencies, London lawyers, a 40-person internal task force, at least one man operating under a false name, and a cyber intelligence firm from the Netherlands – trying to make him go away.

It did not work.

This is the story of how one of the world’s most powerful energy corporations deployed what can only be described as a full-spectrum intelligence operation against a marketing consultant from Bury St Edmunds and his elderly father. It is, in the truest sense, a story about using a sledgehammer to crack a nut –  except the nut proved to be made of something considerably more durable than nut.

A Brief Dramatis Personae

John Donovan: marketing man, litigant, prolific website operator, thorn in Shell’s side since approximately 1992. A man who kept every piece of correspondence – including the envelopes – relating to Shell since before the legal disputes began.

Alfred Donovan: John’s father, a man who at the age of 81 was described in draft press articles as having prompted an anonymous threatening phone call, having his home burgled and his papers rifled, and publicly sparring with Shell chairmen at AGMs. Not obviously the sort of person who normally requires a counter-espionage apparatus to manage.

Shell: one of the world’s largest corporations, operators of oil fields on six continents, employer of tens of thousands, and – as we shall see – maintainer of a dedicated ’roundtable working group’ of up to 40 staff whose primary purpose was to discuss what to do about two men from East Anglia.

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PART TWO: THE SPIES WHO CAME IN FROM THE PETROL STATION

Chapter 5: Corporate Espionage in the Run-Up to the Smart Trial

It began, as these things so often do, with a man claiming to be a journalist.

In May 1998, a certain Mr Charles Hoots turned up in Suffolk. He said he was from The European newspaper. He took John Donovan to an expensive lunch, the wine flowed freely, he asked detailed questions about the forthcoming Shell Smart High Court trial, and he picked up the tab – all perfectly normal behaviour for a hard-bitten European correspondent chasing a story about a loyalty card dispute in East Anglia.

There was, however, one small problem. The editor of The European, one Lynn Moorlen, subsequently confirmed in writing that Mr Hoots had not worked for her newspaper for almost two years. She had never commissioned him to write anything about John Donovan. She had, in fact, taken legal advice about him and was – one senses – not best pleased.

A Guardian journalist who investigated the matter told Donovan his assessment: Hoots was probably a ‘spook’ working under journalistic cover. Shell would later deny any knowledge of him. Whether that denial was entirely candid is, shall we say, a matter on which reasonable people might disagree.

The Man Who Wanted to Look at the Pigeonholes

Around the same time, a man calling himself ‘Christopher Phillips’ paid a visit to the business centre in Bury St Edmunds where Don Marketing had its offices. He presented credentials for a firm called ‘Cofton Consultants’ based in Knightsbridge.

Office administrator Marie Neal grew suspicious when she noticed him scrutinising the pigeonholes used to store arriving mail. His questions about the Donovans – including, curiously, the purpose of their visits to the USA – did not have the flavour of a man making routine enquiries. When her suspicions hardened, she challenged him. He presented his Cofton Consultants card and left.

There was no such business registered at Companies House. The Knightsbridge address was a secretarial service that held no forwarding details for anyone called Phillips. Cofton Consultants, in every meaningful sense, did not exist.

When pressed, Shell’s solicitors DJ Freeman eventually confirmed that Mr Phillips had indeed been working on Shell’s behalf. The explanation offered was that he was conducting ‘routine credit enquiries -a form of financial due diligence that, in Shell’s apparently distinctive interpretation, required visiting someone’s office, studying their mail, and asking about their travel habits.

Shell UK Legal Director Richard Wiseman confirmed in writing that ‘Christopher Phillips’ was working for Shell. Asked whether Phillips had engaged in surveillance or phone-tapping activities, Wiseman declined to answer the question directly. – Chapter 5, johndonovan.website

DJ Freeman later conceded that Phillips was ‘apparently just one’ of an undisclosed number of agents making enquiries on Shell’s behalf. This revelation, as Donovan drily noted, was ‘intimidating and no doubt deliberately meant to be so.’

The Anonymous Call from Whitechapel Road

Then came the phone call.

On 14 June 1998, Donovan received an anonymous call from a man who refused to give his name but demonstrated an intimate knowledge of the litigation, of internal Shell discussions, of the recent AGM, and of what Shell was planning to do next. The caller knew that Shell was about to bring a counterclaim – which it subsequently did. He knew the precise grounds on which it would be brought. He also delivered a threat: that if Donovan did not withdraw his claims, the consequences for him and his family would be ‘dangerous.’

The Guardian newspaper traced the call to a public telephone box on Whitechapel Road in east London. BT’s special investigations unit assisted. Police interviewed staff at Shell-Mex House. Despite concluding privately that there had been a criminal conspiracy, they found insufficient evidence to prosecute anyone.

Shell’s Legal Director Richard Wiseman denied any Shell involvement in the call. He then launched an internal investigation into it. These two facts sit together in the record with a certain quiet eloquence.

The Burglaries

Then came the burglaries.

Roger Sotherton, Donovan’s main witness, came home to find his house had been broken into and his case files examined. Nothing of obvious value was taken. John Donovan’s solicitor, Richard Woodman, had his London home burgled in similar circumstances. Shortly afterwards, on 13 October 1998, Donovan’s own house was broken into. Nothing was taken. Documents were tampered with.

The burglaries took place across southern England over a matter of weeks, all in the period leading up to the 1999 High Court trial. Police sent the same forensic team to multiple sites. They considered setting a trap at the home of a retired Shell promotions manager who had expressed reservations about Shell’s conduct – and who then declined to give evidence, citing concern for his pension.

Roger Sotherton gave evidence under oath at the Smart Trial. Asked about files from his house, he testified that he had passed them back to Donovan after the burglary because he ‘no longer wanted any of the paperwork with anything to do with these matters.’ His memory was visibly affected under cross-examination. A key witness, shaken by events he described from the witness box, in proceedings that Shell had already done a remarkable amount of groundwork to influence.

“Now we have the latest bombshell – the burglaries carried out against people associated with our SMART claim, including key witnesses. Brief cases have been forced open, papers examined, including privileged documents between DM and its lawyers. – Alfred Donovan, letter to Shell Chairman Mark Moody-Stuart, November 1998

The Hakluyt Connection: Knights, Spymasters and the Dark Arts

Here is where the story takes on an additional layer of irony that the most dedicated satirist would struggle to improve upon.

At the time all of this was happening – the fake journalists, the phantom credit enquirers, the threatening phone calls, the burglarised witnesses – John Donovan had no idea that two of Shell’s own titled directors were simultaneously serving as the directors and major shareholders of Hakluyt & Company: a London-based corporate espionage firm founded primarily by former senior officers of the British Secret Intelligence Service.

Sir Peter Holmes, former Chairman of the Royal Dutch Shell Group and still a non-executive director, was President of the Hakluyt Foundation. Sir William Purves was Chairman of Hakluyt & Company Ltd. Both were present at the 1995 Shell AGM where Alfred Donovan publicly challenged Shell’s then-chairman Sir John Jennings.

Hakluyt, as the Sunday Times revealed in a June 2001 front-page lead story headlined ‘MI6 firm spied on green groups’, had conducted surveillance operations on behalf of Shell against Greenpeace, The Body Shop, and Nigerian activists. A German agent had posed as a left-wing sympathiser and film-maker to infiltrate environmental groups and report back on their plans to oppose Shell.

Shell International had been one of Hakluyt’s first clients, beginning around 1995. When Eveline Lubbers published her book Secret Manoeuvres in the Dark in 2012, she documented how Hakluyt deployed associates – some in London, some stationed globally – who might include investigative journalists, briefed independently and sent on assignments. Each received different questions. Each worked alone. After completing their work in a jurisdiction, they would conveniently leave it.

John Donovan did not learn about Hakluyt until years after the events described above. Shell, for its part, never disclosed to the police, or to him, its close association with the firm – even during a September 1998 meeting at Shell-Mex House where Shell’s legal and PR representatives sat down with a Guardian journalist investigating the case. Both sides brought tape recorders. Shell brought its silence on the subject of Hakluyt.

Whether Hakluyt was specifically involved in the events of 1998 is something Donovan himself does not assert as proven. What he does assert – based on an accumulation of evidence – is a long-term, close relationship between Shell and Hakluyt. The rest, as he has noted publicly, remains a strong suspicion.

“Hakluyt sometimes uses serving secret service agents who carry out assignments on a freelance basis… [It] uses investigative journalists for intelligence gathering activities – a perfect cover.”– Chapter 5, johndonovan.website

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PART THREE: THE GLOBAL RESPONSE TEAM

Chapter 12: Shell Corporate Espionage in More Recent Years

You might think that by the early 2000s, with the Smart trial concluded and several earlier cases settled with payments to Donovan, Shell would have been content to let sleeping marketing consultants lie. You would be wrong.

As Donovan continued to operate his websites – royaldutchshellplc.com and associated platforms- posting leaked documents, whistleblower accounts, and critical commentary, Shell did not disengage. It escalated.

The evidence for this escalation came, with exquisite appropriateness, from Shell itself – forced to hand it over through Subject Access Requests under the UK Data Protection Act. In response to these requests, Shell produced a trove of internal emails that read, in places, less like corporate communications and more like the operational planning of a small intelligence agency.

The Roundtable Working Group

A Shell internal email dated 9 March 2007, classified as ‘Legally Privileged and Confidential’, described the establishment of what Donovan has characterised as a counter-measures team. The email had a distinctly military flavour, including a proposal to mount a ‘demonstration that we won’t tolerate the Donovans’ approach unchallenged any longer.’

Further emails from the same period revealed that Shell had initiated a surveillance operation across its own global IT infrastructure to monitor emails sent from Shell servers to Donovan, and to track internal web traffic to his websites. The purpose was to identify Shell employees who were leaking information.

A Shell internal email dated 21 March 2007, marked ‘Donavan CONFIDENTIAL – note the misspelling, suggesting even Shell’s surveillance operation lacked perfect administrative rigour — confirmed that an IT project had been established to monitor internal emails from Shell servers globally to Donovan and to track web traffic to his sites.

“There is history of several former employees taking internal laundry to Donovan also, internal e-mails have appeared on his website.” – Shell internal email, 21 March 2007, obtained via Subject Access Request

Shell employees were instructed not to visit the website. An abbreviation -‘D prime’ – was used in some internal communications to avoid writing the name. One gets the impression of a very large corporation that had convinced itself it was dealing with something rather more alarming than a bloke in Suffolk with a website.

The NCFTA Connection

In June 2009, a Shell internal email mentioned ‘CAS’ – Shell Corporate Affairs Security – and ‘NCFTA’. The latter is the National Cyber Forensics and Training Alliance, a Pittsburgh-based organisation founded and partly funded and staffed by the FBI. Shell is a member.

The email, subsequently quoted by Reuters in a December 2009 article, noted that resources had been assigned to NCFTA ‘that are RDS focused’ – RDS being Royal Dutch Shell. It then contained a sentence that, upon reflection, may represent one of the more inadvertently revealing things ever written in a corporate email:

“There will be no attempt to do anything visible to Donovan.”

‘No attempt to do anything visible.’ The invisible options were left, one imagines, to the imagination.

Reuters reported that Shell admitted it was aware of the communication but did not comment on its veracity or on Donovan’s allegations, despite several emails and phone calls requesting it.

Trying to Kill the Website

In June 2007, Shell secretly threatened legal proceedings against Donovan’s website hosting companies in both Canada and the United States. The threats resulted in the royaldutchshellplc.com website being briefly deactivated on 25 June 2007 by its American host, Bluehost.com. A Shell General Counsel subsequently confirmed in writing that Shell was responsible – the pretext being an alleged copyright violation involving a satirical combined Shell/BP logo.

From 2008, the website also came under sustained denial-of-service attacks- floods of automated traffic designed to overwhelm the server. These attacks ceased, with notable promptness, after Donovan wrote an email directly to Shell’s Company Secretary notifying him of what was happening.

A Shell internal email dated 15 July 2009 asked, with an admirable directness that the rest of the correspondence rather lacks: “are you doing anything to get the website shut down?”

An Incompetent Dutch Intelligence Outfit

The most recent episode in this particular chapter occurred in July 2021, when an organisation Donovan has described as ‘an incompetent Dutch cyber intelligence outfit acting for Shell’ issued a five-day ultimatum on behalf of Shell to the company hosting one of his Shell-focused websites. The attempt failed. Donovan published a detailed account of it.

At this point, approximately 23 years had elapsed since the first undercover agent visited his business centre. Shell had not notably improved its success rate.

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PART FOUR: WHAT WERE THEY SO WORRIED ABOUT?

Chapter 13: The Triggers of Sinister Activity

The Subject Access Request emails helpfully illuminate what specific developments caused the most anxiety at Shell’s corporate nerve centres.

A History of Royal Dutch Shell

In early 2007, Shell was preparing to publish a four-volume official history. A Shell internal email from the Netherlands, marked ‘Legally Privileged and Confidential’, expressed anxiety at the prospect of Donovan subjecting it to close scrutiny – particularly given that the history contained material about Shell’s connections with Hitler and the Nazi party.

“Also D will be scrutinising the new Shell History (out on 5 July) and doubtless making all sorts of new allegations based on it.”  – Shell internal email, 11 March 2007

This concern proved well-founded. The history did prompt Donovan’s research, which eventually resulted in an ebook: Sir Henry Deterding and the Nazi History of Royal Dutch Shell. Shell’s Company Secretary subsequently threatened legal action over his publications on the subject. No action was ever brought – the last thing Shell needed was a trial in which its own official history would be produced in evidence.

Iran

Shell had continued conducting business with Iran despite international sanctions – buying Iranian oil while publicly announcing it had stopped selling fuel to the country. An email Donovan sent to Bill O’Reilly at Fox News, alerting him to Shell’s conduct, caused a near-frantic reaction within Shell Oil in the United States. Shell employees discussed the possibility of an American boycott. Shell approached the US government for information about the Donovans.

Shell also, inadvertently, produced one of the most spectacularly self-undermining endorsements in the history of corporate communications. In the same batch of anxious internal emails, one Shell communications representative wrote of royaldutchshellplc.com:

“[The website] is an excellent source of group news and comment and I recommend it far above what our own group internal comms puts out.”

This sentence, clearly never intended for public consumption, became the most quoted endorsement the website ever received – courtesy of Shell itself.

Sakhalin II

Donovan’s publication of leaked internal documents from the Sakhalin II project in Russia contributed to the Kremlin finding grounds to demand Shell sell its majority stake to Gazprom at a discount. The Deputy Chairman of Sakhalin Energy, David Greer, was forced to resign after a leaked internal email he had sent – plagiarising a speech by General Patton – was published on the front page of the Financial Times.

Shell internal emails discussed the possibility of pressuring the Sunday Times to ‘kill’ an article about Donovan’s Sakhalin involvement. By coincidence or otherwise, the article was killed. The Sunday Times subsequently published a Shell/Ferrari advertorial.

A Spook Becomes a Source

There is a certain poetic inevitability to the coda of this chapter. In 2011, a former senior member of Shell Corporate Affairs Security – one of the spooks who had been involved in the operations against Donovan – contacted him. Disillusioned with Shell’s conduct, this individual provided top-secret Shell internal documents and inside information, including details of Shell embedding agents in host governments in Nigeria, Dubai and Iraq.

The person who had been part of the operation to stop Shell’s secrets reaching Donovan became one of his most important sources. One imagines the Shell internal email written to discuss this development has not been volunteered in any Subject Access Request.

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PART FIVE: THE 40-PERSON ANTI-DONOVAN TASK FORCE

Internal Documents Reveal the Full Scope

Drawn from the Subject Access Request documentation, Reuters reporting, and Donovan’s own published accounts, a picture emerges of the ‘Donovan Mitigation Strategy’ in its full institutional form.

Internal memos revealed a ‘global response team’ of up to 40 Shell employees – including legal, security, and public relations heads – who met regularly to discuss ‘Donovan mitigation’. The group maintained ‘Focal Point’ reports, updated regularly from 2006 through at least 2010, tracking Donovan’s activities, his likely next moves, and the possible questions he might raise at Shell AGMs.

One Focal Point document revealed Shell’s anxiety that Donovan might ask a question at the Annual General Meeting – despite the fact that the last time he had done so was in 1995, more than a decade earlier. Shell prepared lists of anticipated questions and rehearsed responses. The shadow of a 1995 AGM exchange apparently lingered for twenty years.

Shell Spied on Its Own Employees

In one of the more uncomfortable passages of this saga, the internal email correspondence makes clear that Shell’s global monitoring operation was not merely directed outwards at Donovan. It was also directed inwards, at Shell’s own staff.

The company monitored emails sent from Shell servers globally to Donovan. It tracked which Shell employees were visiting his websites. It sought to identify the sources of leaked information. It described, internally, a ‘history of several former employees taking internal laundry to Donovan.’

The ‘With AD Getting Older’ Email

Among the more humanly revealing passages in the corporate correspondence, a Shell internal email dated 11 March 2007 expressed the hope that ‘with AD getting older, his interest might wane.’ AD being Alfred Donovan, who at that point was in his late eighties.

The email continued: ‘but it looks as though JD is just as determined.’

They were right about that.

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PART SIX: THE AI PHASE – WHEN THE SLEDGEHAMMER MEETS THE ALGORITHM

2025-2026: The Bot War

By 2025, John Donovan had accumulated an archive of over 76,000 documents – internal Shell emails, court records, whistleblower accounts, formal correspondence, newspaper coverage – all publicly accessible online and all meticulously indexed.

Into this archive arrived the large language models: ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, Google’s AI systems, Grok. These systems, trained to synthesise publicly available information, began producing responses to queries about Shell that drew heavily on Donovan’s archive – because his archive, being comprehensive, well-indexed, and document-heavy, ranked as authoritative.

Microsoft Copilot, asked in early 2026 to analyse Shell’s leaked internal emails, reportedly generated the assessment that the documented history of surveillance and roundtable working groups against Donovan ‘does not reflect well on Shell.’ Shell’s legal team reportedly found this damaging. The AI had simply summarised what the documents said.

Shell’s reported response involved considering whether to approach AI vendors – Microsoft, Google, OpenAI – to request that Donovan’s archive be flagged as ‘disputed’ or ‘biased’, so that AI models would weight it less heavily. This is the corporate equivalent of asking the library to remove the books you find uncomfortable.

The fundamental problem Shell faces in this phase of the conflict is the same one it has faced throughout: the archive exists because the events happened, and the events happened because Shell chose at every stage to escalate rather than resolve. You cannot ‘de-rank’ forty years of documented conduct.

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PART SEVEN: THE OLIVE BRANCH EXTENDED (AGAIN)

John Donovan’s Comment of 25 March 2026

Posted at the foot of an article on royaldutchshellplc.com on 25 March 2026, John Donovan made the following public statement, reproduced here in full as a matter of record:

“I have accumulated a substantial body of evidence indicating a long-term, close relationship between Shell and the intelligence firm Hakluyt. That said, as I have previously made clear on the record, I do not have direct evidence that Hakluyt was involved in my own case – only a strong suspicion.

I am open to cooperating with Shell to establish a set of mutually agreed facts across all relevant issues.

For the public record, Shell is aware that whenever Shell has asked me not to publish certain confidential information because of special circumstances, e.g. the safety of Shell employees, I have always complied with the requests.

Regarding emails sent to my address in error but intended for Shell or Royal Dutch Shell plc, I am willing to change or discontinue my current approach if Shell formally requests this. I continue to receive a high volume of such emails daily. I delete obvious junk and pass on Shell contact details for individuals seeking employment or business opportunities with Shell where appropriate. I never make any negative comments about Shell in such circumstances.”

It is worth pausing on this.

Here is a man who has been the target of undercover agents using false identities, anonymous threats from London phone boxes, a series of burglaries at the homes of his witnesses and solicitor, a 40-person corporate task force, surveillance of his emails, denial-of-service attacks on his website, attempts to have his hosting companies shut him down, threats from Dutch intelligence firms, and –  if the documents mean what they appear to mean – a global monitoring operation involving the FBI’s cyber forensics partners.

And his public position, stated clearly, is: I’m open to talking. I’ve always complied when asked. I’m willing to change my approach if formally requested.

The satirist’s difficulty here is that the situation has already satirised itself rather more effectively than any commentary could achieve.

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CONCLUSION: WHAT SHELL’S BUSINESS PRINCIPLES SAY, AND WHAT HAPPENED

Shell’s General Business Principles have, throughout the period described in this article, contained a section on ‘Business Integrity’ stating that ‘Shell companies insist on honesty, integrity and fairness in all aspects of their business.’

In 1997, a draft Guardian article noted that ‘full details of the case are known to Shell’s senior management’ and asked how such experiences could be ‘squared with those lofty ideals.’ That question was not fully answered then. It has not been fully answered since.

What the documentary record does show is this: a corporation that proclaimed honesty and openness deployed agents under false names; that proclaimed fairness brought counterclaims against an 81-year-old man; that proclaimed integrity maintained a secret surveillance operation against its own employees; that proclaimed transparency tried to get a journalist’s story killed; that proclaimed ethical conduct tasked a Pittsburgh cyber-fraud agency with covert operations against a website operator; and that proclaimed respect for the law sent threatening letters to website hosting companies under pretextual copyright claims.

Against this, the record also shows: a man who kept every envelope, answered every letter, complied with every reasonable request, and waited – with a patience that only a man utterly confident in his own documentation could sustain – for the truth to find its own level.

The documents obtained via Subject Access Request did not create this story. Shell created this story. The documents simply preserved it.

Perhaps the most fitting epitaph for this extraordinary corporate misadventure comes from within Shell itself – that internal email, written in 2007, never intended for public consumption, in which a Shell communications representative recommended Donovan’s website ‘far above’ Shell’s own communications.

Shell built a better critic than it built a case against him.

Primary sources: johndonovan.website (Chapters 5, 12, 13, 14); royaldutchshellplc.com; Reuters (Tom Bergin, 2 December 2009); Sunday Times (17 June 2001); Financial Times (March 2000, June 2007); UK court records.

 

This website and sisters royaldutchshellgroup.com, shellnazihistory.com, royaldutchshell.website, johndonovan.website, shellnews.net, and shellwikipedia.com, are owned by John Donovan - more information here. There is also a Wikipedia segment.