By John Donovan (with AI assistance)
RoyalDutchShellPLC.com Exclusive
Prologue: The Paper Trail That Became a Web Trail
On 19 September 2016, a post on RoyalDutchShellGroup.com quietly listed “links to several hundred articles by a host of different publishers … plus over 60,000 Shell-related articles” hosted across the Donovan websites.
It read like a piece of digital housekeeping.
In reality, it was the master ledger of how one multinational’s attempts at corporate control ended up immortalising the very archive it wanted to erase.
The post linked outward — to Reuters, The Guardian, The Moscow Times, and beyond — forming a living map of Shell’s missteps, litigation, and internal paranoia, all drawn together by a network of persistence that Shell accidentally helped to publicise.
