THE SHELL LEAKS FILES
SLF-2007-028
The Sakhalin Papers XVIII: “Pipeliners All!” — The Patton Email and the Fall of David Greer
An Authentic Memo, a Front-Page Leak and a Resignation Three Weeks Later
Archive reference: SLF-2007-028
Collection: The Sakhalin Papers
Principal record: David Greer email to Sakhalin Energy pipeline personnel, 18 April 2007, subsequently confirmed as genuine by Shell
Supporting record: Sakhalin Energy Annual Review 2005; Royal Dutch Shell Form 6-K filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission; contemporaneous Financial Times, Reuters and Moscow Times reporting
Evidence standard: The authenticity of the Greer email, its contents, the contemporary reporting and Greer’s subsequent departure are treated as established where independently corroborated. Allegations supplied by whistleblowers, interpretations concerning plagiarism and any claimed causal connection between the leak and Greer’s resignation are separately identified.
Introduction
On 18 April 2007, one of the most important corporate changes in the history of Sakhalin II became formal.
Royal Dutch Shell, Mitsui and Mitsubishi signed the Sale and Purchase Agreement implementing Gazprom’s acquisition of 50 per cent plus one share of Sakhalin Energy. Shell’s stake fell from 55 per cent to 27.5 per cent. The transaction implemented the agreement reached with Gazprom four months earlier.
On that same date, according to the authenticated internal correspondence subsequently obtained from Sakhalin Energy, Deputy Chief Executive and Project Director David Greer sent a motivational email to pipeline personnel.
It began:
“Pipeliners All!”
The timing was remarkable.
Shell had just lost majority control of one of the largest energy developments in the world.
The project still had to be completed.
Schedules remained demanding.
Management was under pressure.
And Greer had apparently concluded that part of his pipeline organisation needed something resembling a battlefield speech.
Within seven weeks, the email would be on the front page of the Financial Times.
Within nine weeks, Greer would have left Sakhalin Energy.
What happened between those dates is well documented.
Why he left is not.
1. David Greer Was Not a Minor Manager
David J. Greer occupied a senior operational position inside Sakhalin Energy.
The company’s own 2005 Annual Review identifies him as:
Deputy CEO and Project Director.
The same official record places him directly within the senior leadership of the Phase 2 development, the enormous construction programme involving offshore facilities, an onshore processing facility, hundreds of kilometres of pipelines, an LNG plant and oil export infrastructure.
By 2007 Greer was also a veteran Shell executive.
Contemporaneous reporting after his departure described him as having completed 27 years of service with Shell, including approximately three and a half years at Sakhalin Energy.
This was therefore not an indiscreet email from a junior employee.
It came from one of the senior executives responsible for delivering the project.
2. 18 April 2007: Two Documents, One Date
The coincidence deserves recording precisely.
Shell’s official Form 6-K states that on 18 April 2007 the Sakhalin Energy shareholders signed the Sale and Purchase Agreement transferring majority ownership to Gazprom. The filing records the resulting holdings as Gazprom 50 per cent plus one share, Shell 27.5 per cent, Mitsui 12.5 per cent and Mitsubishi 10 per cent.
The leaked Greer email is also dated 18 April 2007.
The surviving copy lists numerous recipients and copied personnel associated with pipelines, engineering, construction, finance, HSE, commissioning and other project functions.
There is no evidence that the two events were causally connected.
But chronologically they belong to the same day.
Gazprom was formally entering as controlling shareholder.
Greer was telling his pipeline organisation how he expected it to perform under the conditions that followed.
3. The Message Behind “Pipeliners All!”
The email was written after what Greer called a Bi-Annual Challenge meeting.
He told staff that he retained complete confidence in their ability to complete the task, but expressed concern about comments and body language he had observed.
His message was unmistakable.
He believed elements of the organisation were displaying insufficient confidence and fighting spirit.
The language then became increasingly martial.
Greer wrote:
“I despise cowards”
and concluded one of the central passages:
“Lead me, Follow me or Get out of my way.”
He also announced a Pipeline Recovery Plan Support Team.
Whatever one thinks about the prose, the email provides a contemporaneous window into management conditions inside Sakhalin Energy.
This was a project leadership team worried about delivery.
4. The Schedule Pressure Was Real
The Financial Times immediately recognised that the significance of the email extended beyond its theatrical language.
Its report placed Greer’s message against Sakhalin II’s rising costs, environmental controversy and the recent Gazprom transaction, and interpreted the memo as evidence of pressure on management to meet the project timetable.
That interpretation was consistent with Sakhalin Energy’s own earlier published schedule.
The company’s 2005 Annual Review had acknowledged that Phase 2 costs were expected to reach approximately $20 billion and that first LNG deliveries had slipped to summer 2008. It nevertheless said management would continue aggressively pursuing schedule improvements within safety and environmental commitments.
By April 2007, therefore, schedule recovery was not an abstract management exercise.
It had direct commercial consequences.
5. The Whistleblower Context
The Greer email did not arrive in isolation.
On 5 June 2007, the Donovan website published information supplied by a Sakhalin insider alleging that senior management was putting intense pressure on personnel over pipeline completion dates.
Those allegations went substantially further than anything established merely by Greer’s motivational email.
They accused management of rejecting specialist assessments that did not support a December 2007 pipeline objective and alleged that staff were being pressured to commit to an unrealistic programme.
Those claims were whistleblower allegations.
They were not judicial findings.
They were not admissions by Shell.
They should not be presented as proven simply because the Greer memo emerged from the same source.
What the memo independently demonstrated was narrower:
management itself was concerned about confidence, schedule delivery and the need for a pipeline recovery effort.
6. Shell Authenticates the Email
Authentication is one of the strongest parts of the record.
On 5 June 2007, Alfred Donovan reported that Shell Exploration & Production General Counsel Keith Ruddock had responded to the leaked document and said that the attached Greer email appeared authentic.
More importantly, the authentication was independently confirmed by the Financial Times.
Ed Crooks reported that Shell had confirmed the email was genuine while declining to discuss it further.
That removes a recurring difficulty with leaked corporate material.
There is no need to speculate about whether somebody fabricated the Greer memo.
Shell confirmed it.
7. The Financial Times Takes It National
On 5 June, with publication continuing into the following day’s edition, the Financial Times ran Ed Crooks’s report on the leaked memo.
The story identified Greer, described the Sakhalin II backdrop, reproduced key parts of the email and stated that the material had been leaked to RoyalDutchShellPlc.com.
The story also appeared under the headline:
“Shell’s team in ‘hell’ feels the heat.”
The newspaper separately made Greer’s email available to readers and opened an online discussion asking whether it might qualify as the worst motivational memo ever.
What had begun as internal management communication was now international business news.
8. Then Somebody Recognised General Patton
The story changed almost immediately.
A reader participating in the FT discussion recognised similarities between Greer’s language and a famous speech associated with General George S. Patton before the Allied invasion of Europe.
The Financial Times investigated.
On 7 June 2007, Crooks published a follow-up concluding that Greer had borrowed heavily from Patton’s wartime rhetoric.
The comparison involved more than one memorable phrase.
The structure and ideas concerning winning, contempt for cowardice, childhood admiration for champions and the language of fighting had close counterparts in the Patton material, although Greer adapted references to soldiers and Americans for engineers and professionals.
One of Greer’s closing injunctions was also associated with Patton.
The motivational memo had become a plagiarism story.
9. What “Plagiarism” Means Here
Contemporary journalists did not all use precisely the same terminology.
The Financial Times described Greer as having borrowed heavily from Patton.
Lucy Kellaway, writing in the FT on 11 June, was less restrained and said substantial portions had been taken without attribution.
It is therefore reasonable to describe the resulting episode as a plagiarism controversy.
But this archive makes no legal finding of plagiarism, copyright infringement or professional misconduct.
No court judgment establishing any such liability has been located.
Nor is there evidence that Shell instituted disciplinary proceedings based upon the borrowing.
Indeed, Shell’s later public position pointed in the opposite direction.
10. Not Everyone Thought the Memo Was Terrible
The contemporary reaction was not uniformly hostile.
The FT discussion attracted contributions from people defending Greer as a forceful and effective manager operating under extraordinarily difficult conditions.
One contributor described him as among the best managers he had encountered; others argued that critics sitting far from Sakhalin underestimated the practical difficulty of completing such a project.
Kellaway’s own assessment was more nuanced than the headline controversy might suggest.
Although she criticised the writing and unattributed borrowing, she also observed that Greer at least confronted low morale directly rather than hiding behind conventional corporate language.
That distinction matters.
The email could simultaneously be regarded as derivative, bombastic and revealing of a manager confronting a genuinely difficult delivery problem.
11. Two Weeks Later, Greer Was Gone
Then came the development that transformed an embarrassing memo into a corporate mystery.
On 21 June 2007, Reuters reported that Greer had resigned.
A Shell spokesman in Moscow confirmed the departure.
Reuters noted that the resignation came approximately two weeks after the leaked email became public and that the spokesman declined to say whether the memo had caused Greer’s departure.
The Moscow Times reported the following day that Greer had left Sakhalin Energy to pursue other business interests.
Sakhalin Energy spokesman Ivan Chernyakhovsky confirmed the departure and said Greer had worked at the company for about three and a half years.
The chronology is clear.
The explanation is not.
12. Sakhalin Energy Explicitly Rejected the Obvious Inference
Because the timing invited speculation, the Moscow Times put the issue directly to Sakhalin Energy.
The company’s spokesman said that any suggestion Greer’s departure was connected with the leaked email was “pure speculation.”
That statement must be included in any fair account.
The newspaper also reported that Shell spokesman Maxim Shub could not say when Greer had tendered his resignation.
Greer himself was unavailable for comment.
Accordingly, the documentary record does not permit the statement:
David Greer was dismissed because his Patton email leaked.
Nor does it establish that he resigned because Shell ordered him to do so.
What it establishes is temporal proximity.
13. Shell Said There Were No Grounds for an Inquiry
The Financial Times returned to the story on 22 June.
Its “Memo writer in the Shell annals” item recorded Greer’s resignation and the earlier Patton controversy.
Significantly, it also reported Shell’s position that the email “gave no grounds for any inquiry.”
Shell paid tribute to Greer’s 27 years of service, including his secondment to Sakhalin Energy, and wished him well.
That is difficult to reconcile with any claim that Shell publicly treated the memo as proven misconduct warranting dismissal.
It did not.
At least publicly, Shell defended Greer against that interpretation.
14. What Reuters Could — and Could Not — Say
Reuters adopted similarly cautious wording.
Its report described Greer as resigning two weeks after the email had been leaked and noted criticism both of its aggressive tone and its borrowing from Patton.
But when the news agency sought a causal explanation, Shell declined to provide one.
That is precisely where this archive should stop.
Journalistic proximity is evidence of chronology.
It is not evidence of causation.
An executive leaving shortly after an embarrassing disclosure may suggest a connection.
Suggestion is not proof.
15. There Is No Judicial Verdict on the Greer Affair
Unlike some other episodes in The Shell Leaks Files, the Greer controversy does not turn on a court judgment.
No located judicial decision establishes that Greer committed actionable plagiarism.
No court has found that Shell forced him out.
No court has found that the Donovan publication caused his departure.
And no known proceeding adjudicated the allegations made by the Sakhalin whistleblower whose material accompanied publication of the memo.
That absence is itself part of the evidential record.
This was a corporate and media episode, not a judicially resolved dispute.
The broader Sakhalin II project later appeared in UK litigation concerning governmental environmental-information disclosure, but that case did not determine any question concerning Greer’s email or resignation.
16. The Memo Revealed More Than Its Author Intended
The most important historical value of the Greer email may not be the Patton borrowing at all.
Read without the jokes and headlines, it reveals something about the internal atmosphere surrounding the project immediately after Gazprom took majority ownership.
Management perceived discouragement.
Management wanted greater confidence.
Management believed a recovery effort was necessary.
Management was exhorting personnel to overcome remaining pipeline challenges.
And this message was being delivered on the exact date the corporate transfer to Gazprom was being implemented.
The memo was intended to motivate an internal audience.
Instead, it became an unintended contemporary record of pressure.
17. The Leak Chain
The documentary sequence can be reconstructed without speculation.
An insider supplied the Greer material to the Donovan operation.
The Donovan website sought authentication from Shell.
Shell General Counsel Keith Ruddock was reported as saying the email appeared authentic.
The material was published.
The Financial Times obtained it and independently reported that Shell confirmed it was genuine.
The FT placed the story prominently before its readers.
A reader recognised the Patton connection.
The FT published the comparison.
The affair generated further commentary.
Approximately two weeks later, Greer left Sakhalin Energy.
Reuters and the Moscow Times reported the departure.
Sakhalin Energy rejected a causal connection as speculation.
Shell subsequently said the memo did not justify an inquiry.
That is the documentary chain.
Nothing needs to be added to it.
Documentary Findings
Established
David Greer was Deputy Chief Executive and Project Director of Sakhalin Energy. Sakhalin Energy’s own published records identify him in those positions.
The Greer email was dated 18 April 2007.
On the same date, Shell, Mitsui and Mitsubishi signed the transaction implementing Gazprom’s acquisition of 50 per cent plus one share of Sakhalin Energy.
The email contained martial motivational language, addressed confidence within the pipeline organisation and announced a recovery-support initiative.
Shell confirmed to the Financial Times that the email was genuine.
The Financial Times subsequently demonstrated extensive similarities between Greer’s language and material associated with General George S. Patton.
Greer left Sakhalin Energy on or about 21 June 2007.
Shell recorded his 27 years of service and said the email provided no grounds for an inquiry.
Alleged but not established
A Sakhalin insider alleged that management had been pressuring specialists to support an unrealistic December 2007 pipeline completion programme.
The same source alleged that professional assessments inconsistent with that objective were being marginalised.
Those claims were published alongside the authenticated Greer email but are not authenticated merely because the Greer document itself proved genuine.
They remain allegations unless independently corroborated.
Not established
It has not been established that Greer’s email caused his resignation.
Sakhalin Energy expressly described that suggestion as speculation.
It has not been established that Greer was dismissed.
It has not been established that Shell conducted a disciplinary investigation concerning the Patton material.
It has not been established by any court that Greer committed legally actionable plagiarism.
And it has not been established that the whistleblower allegations accompanying the memo were all correct.
Commentary
The easy version of this story is irresistible.
Senior Shell executive writes absurd motivational memo.
Memo leaks.
Newspaper discovers he copied General Patton.
Executive resigns.
Case closed.
But documentary history demands more discipline.
The first three propositions are secure.
The fourth needs qualification.
Greer unquestionably left shortly after the affair became public.
That does not tell us why.
Shell had just undergone a humiliating loss of control at Sakhalin II.
Gazprom had become majority shareholder.
The project remained under severe completion pressure.
Senior organisational changes were inevitable.
Greer may have decided to leave.
Shell may have wanted a change.
Gazprom’s arrival may have altered the management landscape.
The publicity may have mattered.
Several factors may have operated simultaneously.
The surviving evidence does not allow us to select one and label it proven.
What can be said with greater confidence is that the email became embarrassing for reasons far beyond literary borrowing.
A senior executive responsible for one of the world’s largest energy construction projects had inadvertently given outsiders a glimpse of the atmosphere inside his organisation.
There were mutterings.
There was poor body language.
Management perceived a lack of confidence.
A recovery team was being created.
And the man running the project believed military rhetoric was required to rally his engineers.
For a project that had just endured cost escalation, environmental confrontation and the transfer of majority ownership to Gazprom, that was newsworthy even before anybody recognised General Patton.
The plagiarism story made it entertaining.
The management context made it historically useful.
Source Record
The principal primary record is David Greer’s 18 April 2007 internal Sakhalin Energy email, preserved in the contemporary Donovan archive. Its authenticity does not depend solely upon the archive that published it: the Financial Times independently reported that Shell confirmed the email was genuine.
Greer’s corporate status is independently confirmed by Sakhalin Energy’s 2005 Annual Review, which identifies David J. Greer as Deputy CEO and Project Director.
The ownership context is established by Royal Dutch Shell plc’s Form 6-K, filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, recording the 18 April 2007 transaction under which Gazprom obtained 50 per cent plus one share and Shell’s holding fell to 27.5 per cent.
Contemporaneous press sources include Ed Crooks’s Financial Times reporting of 5–7 June 2007, the FT follow-up following Greer’s departure, Reuters on 21 June and the Moscow Times on 22 June. These sources independently establish publication, Shell’s authentication, the Patton comparison, Greer’s departure and the company’s refusal to confirm a causal connection.
No court judgment is relied upon as establishing misconduct, causation or liability in relation to the Greer affair.
Archive disclaimer: Authentication of the Greer email does not authenticate every allegation published alongside it. Temporal proximity between publication and resignation does not establish causation. Contemporary descriptions of plagiarism are reported as part of the media record and are not presented as judicial findings.
Site wide disclaimer also applies.
Next Archive File
SLF-2007-029 — The Sakhalin Papers XIX: The December Deadline — What the Whistleblower Said Would Happen
The Greer memo was only one part of the package supplied from inside Sakhalin Energy.
Alongside it came a far more consequential allegation.
The insider said management was pursuing a December 2007 pipeline target that technical specialists did not believe was achievable.
According to the source, staff were being pressured to sign up to the programme.
The source even attempted to calculate the financial consequences if the deadline failed.
Those predictions can now be tested against the historical record.
When were the pipelines actually completed?
When did year-round oil begin?
When did the LNG plant finally start operating?
What did Sakhalin Energy tell shareholders and governments at the time?
And which parts of the whistleblower warning proved right, wrong or impossible to verify?
SLF-2007-029 will put the 2007 insider forecast beside the subsequent project record — document against document, prediction against outcome.
*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, the Shell DPA Files, "Shell and the Spies", the Shell Leaks files, the Independent Shell Archive, as well as books written and published by John Donovan - Kindle eBooks. Timeline of the Donovan Shell Feud. Toxic History of Royal Dutch Shell Group. Shell and the Donovans: The Full Media Record — 550+ Articles, 110 Books, 40 Years. *All conjured up by internet wizz, Nick Gill.
