A satirical summary by Claude of John Donovan’s book “Toxic Facts About Shell Removed From Wikipedia. Image by ChatGPT.
The Wikipedia Problem, or: How a Global Oil Giant Developed an Allergy to Facts
In what is surely the most surprising development in the history of the internet — a company with $35 billion in annual profits was apparently terrified of a retired marketing man and his elderly father living in Colchester, Essex — John Donovan opens this cheerful tour of corporate malfeasance by explaining that Wikipedia, the free encyclopaedia anyone can edit, has been systematically “cleansed” of accurate, sourced, verifiable information about Royal Dutch Shell. Shell employees, it transpires, were caught editing Wikipedia articles from Shell offices. The company, naturally, claimed to have been completely unaware that the people it employed were doing this. One must admire the logic: when you have tens of thousands of employees, it is simply impossible to know what any of them are up to.
Donovan — who frankly should have retired to a golf course decades ago but appears constitutionally incapable of it — was the originating author of the deleted Wikipedia articles in question, and has helpfully republished them here, on the heroic grounds that the public deserves to know. Wikipedia, he observes with considerable understatement, has a flaw: it allows anonymous editing. Anonymous editors can vote to delete articles, vote to keep them, and pursue vendettas against contributors they find inconvenient — all without disclosing whether they happen to work in communications for a major oil conglomerate. Donovan compares this culture, memorably, to the Ku Klux Klan, fortunately without the racist element. The Wikipedia community will be pleased to hear the qualification.
Chapter Two: The Controversies, or: A Partial List of Things Shell Would Prefer You Not Know
Having established that the Wikipedia article on Shell controversies was deleted — one within hours of publication, which does suggest someone somewhere was paying very close attention — Donovan reproduces it in full. It is, to put it mildly, quite a list.
Rhodesia sanctions-busting: When the United Nations imposed an oil embargo on Rhodesia in 1965, Shell’s chairman wrote to the British government assuring them that no Shell company was supplying oil to the rebel colony. The Bingham Report of 1978 revealed this to have been, let us say, a generous interpretation of events. Shell Mozambique had been routing oil to Rhodesia via South African brokers all along. Shell’s senior executives were criticised for failing to monitor what their local employees were doing. Presumably they were also unaware.
Italy: Shell’s local management in Italy had, over five years, paid roughly £2.5 million in political contributions to Italian politicians. They recorded these in the accounts as “advertising and publicity expenses,” which is one way to describe them. The General Manager responsible “had operated without authority and had misrecorded the payments” and was dismissed. Shell, one assumes, was completely unaware of all of this as well.
Nigeria: The Ken Saro-Wiwa affair occupies several pages, and so it should. Shell operated in the Niger Delta for decades while environmental devastation accumulated, communities suffered, and peaceful protestors were suppressed. When Saro-Wiwa and eight others were executed by the Nigerian military regime in 1995, much of the worldwide condemnation was directed at Shell, which was found to have been providing money and supplies to the Nigerian military. Shell said it had merely asked for police protection, which is technically true, in the same way that asking someone to kindly burn down a building is merely making a request. A subsequent Christian Aid report found that Shell had “failed to use its considerable interest in Nigeria to bring about change,” and discovered that of 81 claimed community improvement projects, 20 did not exist, 36 were partially successful, and only 25 were actually working. One almost admires the consistency.
Oil and gas reserves scandal: In January 2004, Shell announced it had been overstating its proven reserves by approximately 23%, or 4.47 billion barrels of oil equivalent. The US Securities and Exchange Commission, not known for hyperbole, fined Shell $70 million. The UK Financial Services Authority added £17 million, describing Shell’s conduct as “market abuse.” The Economist compared the affair to “a scam of Enron proportions.” Shell’s chairman and several senior executives departed. Bonus payments, it emerged, had been tied to reserves figures. Shell subsequently set aside $500 million to settle shareholder class actions. One notes that discovering your reserves are 23% smaller than advertised is the kind of mistake that is difficult to make accidentally.
Other highlights in brief: a $2 million UN fine for shipping Iraqi oil in violation of an international embargo; a class action over Jiffy Lube’s practice of adding fake “environmental surcharges” to customers’ bills (described by one plaintiff’s attorney as “a straight rip-off for $1.25 every time someone came in”); participation in European price-fixing cartels for bitumen and synthetic rubber — with fines increased for being a repeat offender and for having “instigated and led” the cartel; fictitious crude oil futures trades on the New York Mercantile Exchange; and Shell’s Japan subsidiary losing approximately $1.4 billion through unauthorised currency speculation, which a senior executive called “a gross contravention of established rules and practices which was deliberately concealed.” It is difficult to read this list without a growing admiration for whoever writes Shell’s annual Statement of General Business Principles pledging “honesty, integrity and transparency.”
Chapter Three: The Environment, or: A Tour of Fines, Spills and Smoking Chimneys
The environmental chapter is, if anything, more bracing. Highlights include a pipeline rupture in Bellingham, Washington, in 1999, which killed two ten-year-old boys and a teenager, injured nine others, discharged over 230,000 gallons of gasoline, and was attributed to “gross negligence in the operation and maintenance of the pipeline.” Shell paid $25 million in fines and faced criminal penalties of $15 million. A Shell refinery in Norco, Louisiana exploded in 1988, killing six, injuring 42, shattering windows 30 miles away, and sending 159 million pounds of toxic chemicals into the air. Residents, according to contemporaneous reports, were “fed up over recurring emergencies that had forced them to evacuate their homes eight times in 12 years.” Shell paid $172 million to some 17,000 claimants.
In California, Shell’s involvement with the Rocky Mountain Arsenal near Denver — described in an academic paper as “the most polluted piece of ground in America” — involved a legal battle of such ambition that Shell simultaneously sued the US Army for $1.8 billion while the Department of Justice sued Shell for $1.9 billion. They eventually agreed to split the cleanup costs.
In Brazil, Shell’s chemical plant at Paulinia contaminated groundwater and soil with carcinogenic pesticides for decades. Shell’s considered response was to conduct blood tests on local residents and conclude that the toxin levels “were not harmful,” which will have been reassuring to the people allegedly suffering from cancerous growths, intestinal disorders, lung diseases, and children with neurological defects. Shell’s philosophical position on the matter was summarised by a professor who quoted company officials as arguing that cleaning up completely would be unnecessary since the risk is “overcome if no one drinks the subterranean water.” This is technically true, in the same way that a house fire is manageable if one simply moves to another house.
On the advertising front, both the UK and Dutch Advertising Standards Authorities ruled that Shell’s charming campaign depicting flowers growing from refinery chimneys was misleading. Friends of the Earth had calculated that only a tiny fraction of Shell’s CO2 emissions were actually piped into greenhouses for the growing of flowers. Shell said this was unfair. The Financial Times coined the term “greenwashing” in connection with the affair, and the term has since entered general use, which is perhaps the most lasting contribution Shell has made to public discourse.
Chapter Four: Safety, or: Thirty-Seven Deaths and a “Mixed” Record
The Wall Street Journal, in March 2007, noted dryly that despite BP receiving enormous criticism for its safety record following the Texas City refinery explosion — which killed 15 workers — Royal Dutch Shell had lost 37 employees and contractors in 2006 alone, compared to 7 at BP, which employs roughly the same number of people. Shell’s own CEO described the safety performance as “mixed.” A former Group Auditor of Shell International, Bill Campbell, alleged that Shell platforms in the North Sea were operating under a policy known internally as “Touch F*** All,” whereby offshore managers were instructed to avoid any work with the potential to cause unplanned shutdowns. Shell described this allegation as “untrue” and “absolutely refuted.” The UK Health and Safety Executive subsequently partially upheld complaints about Shell’s safety practices, issued ten improvement notices in 2006 alone, and eventually served a legally enforceable prohibition notice on the Brent Charlie platform, ordering it to cease production. Shell maintained throughout that safety was its “first priority.”
The Brent Bravo platform in the North Sea, where two workers were killed in 2003 when a gas leak resulted from an illegal repair to a corroded pipe — a repair that had been in place for ten months — was the subject of a Fatal Accident Inquiry which concluded the deaths could have been avoided. Shell was fined £900,000, described as the largest fine for a North Sea accident at the time. The inquiry found that Campbell’s 1999 safety audit, which identified widespread violations and alleged falsification of records, had accurately anticipated the conditions that led to the deaths. Campbell had been unable to present his evidence to the inquiry on the grounds that it was beyond the inquiry’s scope.
Chapter Five: Good Works, or: In Which Shell Plants Some Trees
Donovan is commendably fair-minded. He dedicates an entire chapter to Shell’s genuine good works, including the Shell Foundation, the Shell LiveWIRE youth enterprise programme operating in 23 countries, the Shell Springboard clean-tech competition, a pilot scheme to turn algae into fuel in Hawaii, a $5 million donation to a Health Promotion Centre in Brunei, extensive charitable giving through the United Way and Salvation Army, and a long and successful partnership with Ferrari. Shell pioneered scenario planning in the 1970s, a technique later adopted by the CIA. The Shell Eco-marathon has been inspiring students to build fuel-efficient vehicles since 1939. A Laval University team once achieved the equivalent of 2,757 miles per gallon.
This is all genuine, and Donovan says so. The effect, placed between the environmental chapter and the Wikipedia chapter, is perhaps not quite what Shell’s communications department would have wished.
Chapter Six: The Donovan Story, or: Two Men in Colchester vs. One of the World’s Largest Corporations
The book concludes with the Wikipedia article on royaldutchshellplc.com, which Donovan reproduces on the grounds that it too has been heavily censored. The Donovans, father and son, ran a successful sales promotion agency that devised some of Shell’s most lucrative forecourt promotions in the 1980s and early 1990s, including schemes with budgets of several million dollars. The relationship “floundered,” as Donovan puts it with characteristic understatement, after Shell’s new promotions manager appropriated their confidential ideas. What followed was approximately two decades of High Court actions, County Court proceedings, World Intellectual Property Organisation proceedings, libel suits — brought by both sides — and the eventual creation of what one American newspaper described as “the world’s most effective adversarial website.” Shell lost the WIPO case. Shell also lost its attempt to seize the domain names royaldutchshellplc.com, royaldutchshellgroup.com, and shellnews.net.
A Japanese business magazine concluded that “the fate of Sakhalin 2 was changed by two British men.” The Sakhalin-2 project, Shell’s largest single investment, was a $20 billion gas project in Russia from which Shell was eventually forced to surrender majority control to Gazprom at what outside analysts estimated was approximately half the market value. The evidence used by Russian environmental authorities to pressure Shell over the project had been supplied by John Donovan from his house in Colchester, Essex. Shell was, at the time, subject to a global spying operation by Shell Corporate Affairs Security. The target of the operation was, in part, a retired marketing consultant and his elderly father.
The Financial Times described the website as “a long-running thorn in Shell’s side.” Prospect magazine called it “an open wound for Shell.” The One World Trust concluded that “a gripe site can have a profound impact on global organisations.” Alfred Donovan, who fought the Japanese army in Burma as a communications officer and subsequently spent thirty years in a legal dispute with a global oil company, passed away in 2013, as reported in The Guardian. The Wikipedia article on his website still listed him as active at the time of this book’s publication in 2017.
Toxic Facts About Shell Removed From Wikipedia (ISBN 978-1-64007-423-1) was published in May 2017. It is available as an ebook. Shell PLC has declined to comment.
