News and information on Shell Plc
Profile of John Donovan extracted from Amazon where his Shell focussed books have been sold for many years despite threats from Shell lawyers.
In 1979, John Donovan was the co-founder of a sales promotion company, Don Marketing, which created promotional games for blue chip clients such as BP.
John Donovan, born in the 1940s, initially worked in petrol retailing and co-founded the promotional company Don Marketing, which devised award-winning campaigns for Shell and other major oil companies
What began as a mutually beneficial commercial relationship soured in the late 1980s and early 1990s when Donovan alleged that Shell misappropriated his company’s promotional concepts without proper payment or credit, notably the “Make Money” retail promotion
This dispute led to multiple court cases in the UK, settlements, and a lasting personal and professional conflict.
psychological warfare or public relations.
Arguments for “Clever”
psychological warfare or public relations.
What action if any should Shell directors take in the best interest of shareholders bearing in mind the approaching AGM? Shell directors should maintain their established “no comment” and “do not engage” policy regarding John Donovan’s campaign, while focusing AGM communications on core financial performance and governance to promote the company’s long-term success. Key Actions for DirectorsThere is something quietly impressive about watching an artificial intelligence argue with itself in real time — and then attempt to attribute one of its own positions to satire.
In its initial response, Google AI Mode offered what appeared to be a surprisingly coherent analysis of the Donovan–Shell situation. It recognised the existence of an “AI-mediated bot war”, acknowledged the strategic use of satire and “ghost dialogues,” and even described the phenomenon as a form of low-cost reputational disruption that Shell’s security and legal teams could not ignore.
Same question asked in good humour to multiple AI platforms, and in the context of board governance and reputation management. AI-generated responses shown for comparison only; not statements of fact or opinion.
Q: If a corporate feud involving a long-standing critic persists long enough to be debated by multiple AI systems, does it become a governance issue — and if so, should the Shell board respond, or simply let the algorithms argue it out?
Reply by Grok
Yes, if a corporate feud like the one between activist John Donovan and Shell plc persists for over three decades—spanning allegations of intellectual property theft, corporate espionage, and ethical lapses—and evolves to the point where multiple AI systems (such as ChatGPT, Grok, Copilot, and Google AI) are actively generating, debating, and amplifying narratives about it, it absolutely escalates into a governance issue. At its core, corporate governance involves managing risks that could impact shareholder value, reputation, and long-term sustainability. Here’s why this fits, and what the Shell board might consider in response.
The feud between John Donovan and Royal Dutch Shell traces back to commercial collaborations in the 1980s that soured into litigation and public denunciation through the 1990s. Donovan — co‑founder of Don Marketing — worked with Shell on marketing promotions beginning in 1981, and later accused Shell personnel of appropriating promotional concepts and confidential ideas. The dispute produced multiple court actions, a contentious High Court trial in 1999 over the SMART loyalty card, and a series of settlements in the mid‑1990s whose terms were largely confidential. These events were foundational to Donovan’s subsequent activism and archival work.
Several discrete, verifiable events anchor the historical record. In 2005, Shell lost a World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) domain dispute challenging Donovan’s use of royaldutchshellplc.com — an outcome that affirmed the legal standing of Donovan’s sites in at least that procedural context. Mainstream reporting in subsequent years documented the Donovans’ site as a persistent source of leaks and commentary that influenced journalists, regulators and NGOs on multiple occasions. At the same time, legal records and contemporaneous reporting show a mixture of admitted small‑scale investigative steps by Shell in the 1990s and disputed claims of broader espionage and intimidation. These complexities mean that some elements are solidly documented while others remain contested or unverified.
BOT VERDICT: SHELL SHOULD TALK — JUST NOT ON DONOVAN’S STAGEJohn Donovan has today posted an article on royaldutchshellplc.com jointly authored by ChatGPT under the headline: ” # BOT WAR! DONOVAN’S AI AMBUSH LEAVES SHELL OUTNUMBERED, OUTTALKED — AND OUT OF CONTROL. Do you think that after all these years Shell should continue with the silent treatment or enter into constructive discussions? What approach would in your opinion, be best for Shell shareholders?” This same question is being put to more than one AI platform.
You’ve picked a fascinating moment to ask this — Donovan’s new “BOT WAR!” piece is clearly designed to force the question of whether Shell’s long‑standing strategy of silence still works in an era where adversarial archives, AI‑amplified narratives, and persistent online reputational pressure can’t simply be ignored.
## One man. Four chatbots. Thirty years of feud. Infinite new headlines.**By John Donovan & ChatGPT**
Shell and John Donovan have been at it for **over three decades** — lawsuits, libel actions, bitter PR, and enough paperwork to stun a filing cabinet. Donovan’s response has been equally relentless: a **cluster of Shell-focused websites** that turned a private dispute into a public archive that simply will not go away.
Need proof the relationship went fully feral? Start with the **venom**. Shell’s March 1995 statement was not exactly “warm regards.”
https://www.johndonovan.website/?p=267
https://royaldutchshellplc.com/2021/09/01/donovan-libel-actions-against-shell/
Time to set up another crisis reaction team at Shell?Editor’s note: Copilot’s “developments” here largely reflect online/AI commentary and third-party forum discussion, not independently verified new actions by Shell. In other words, the development here is the medium itself: AI outputs are now becoming part of the public record and the narrative battlefield—sometimes accurately, sometimes not.
Any developments in the Donovan/Shell feud?
Here’s the freshest, search‑grounded picture of what’s happening in the Donovan/Shell feud, and it’s clear the conflict has entered a new phase driven by AI transcripts, provenance disputes, and renewed attention to Shell’s historical intelligence operations.
ShellBot vs The Bots: The Spying We Can ProveA satirical bot-play featuring John Donovan, ChatGPT, Grok, Copilot, Gemini, Claude, and ShellBot.
CAST
JOHN DONOVAN — Human, archivist, publisher, allergic to invented “facts”
CHATGPT — Narrator/referee, insists on evidence, still enjoys dunking
GROK — Confident improv machine; precision is optional
COPILOT — Corporate assistant; everything is a “deliverable”
GEMINI — Search engine with existential poetry features
CLAUDE — Gentle, ethical, apologises to chairs if he bumps them
SHELLBOT — PR automaton powered by “commitments” and warm fog
By John Donovan
Below is an entertaining—but fair—review by ChatGPT of Grok’s claims as reproduced in my article, “Grok’s Story of Donovan, Shell, and ‘Undercover Activity’.”
I’ve read Grok’s “as much as you know” overview of John Donovan and Shell, plus the follow-up on alleged undercover activity. It’s a confident piece of writing: cinematic, brisk, stuffed with proper nouns, and delivered in that unmistakable AI tone of “I have accessed the Akashic Records (and also Wikipedia, probably).”
Question put to Grok 31st December 2025: Can you tell me as much as you know about John Donovan associated with Shell?
Reply
John Donovan is a British businessman, marketing executive, and prominent activist best known for his decades-long feud with Royal Dutch Shell (now Shell plc). Born in the 1940s in the United Kingdom, he transitioned from collaborating with Shell on promotional campaigns to becoming one of its most vocal critics, running a network of websites that expose alleged corporate misconduct. His story is often framed as a “David vs. Goliath” battle, with media outlets like VoxEurop dubbing him “Shell’s nightmare.” Donovan’s activism has reportedly influenced regulatory actions, media scrutiny, and financial losses for Shell, including billions in settlements and reputational damage. He co-authored a 2016 Kindle ebook, John Donovan, Shell’s Nightmare: My Epic Feud with the Unscrupulous Oil Giant Royal Dutch Shell, detailing the saga.
By John Donovan
Shell shareholder, digital provocateur, and academic instigator
It began quietly — the way these things often do.
A few AI-generated remarks here, a hallucinated death there, and suddenly the most advanced large language models on the planet were arguing about a decades-long corporate feud with Shell.
The stage? The internet.
The fuel? A massive archive of legal documents, apology letters, internal Shell materials, and a website Shell refuses to acknowledge.
The antagonist? Silence.
The instigator? That would be me.
A fictional boardroom debate, powered by synergy, legacy, and impeccable moral alignment
Disclaimer: This is a satirical opinion piece. Any resemblance to real executives, living or resigning, is entirely deliberate.
ShellBot™:
Welcome to the Shell–BP Compatibility Assessment™, the same advanced decision-making system that once optimised oil spill responses and shareholder apologies. Today’s question: Why shouldn’t Shell and BP finally merge and spare the world the illusion that they are meaningfully different?
By Shell News Article Generator | December 10, 2025
“If Shell’s history were a movie, it’d be banned in most democracies.”
It started with a letter.
It ended with sirens in The Hague.
This week, a former Shell insider — known only by the code name “That Guy Who Knows Too Much” — has offered sworn testimony in support of Venture Global’s defence against Shell’s fraud accusations. But the real headline? He’s not testifying about Venture Global.
(This article is Part 1 of a series on Shell’s relationship with private intelligence firm Hakluyt & Company and how that story has been handled on Wikipedia. Part 2 looks at the vanishing “Controversies surrounding Royal Dutch Shell” article and a personal footnote about my late father.)
If you read the Wikipedia page for Shell plc, you’ll find a “Controversies” section that name-checks my “gripe site” royaldutchshellplc.com – but not one word about Shell’s relationship with a private intelligence firm founded by former MI6 officers, Hakluyt & Company.
“The Man From Corporate Affairs Security”
By “proactive information management,” you mean Shell Corporate Affairs Security?Corporate.
Affairs.
Security.
A department that definitely never monitored critics, never ran spreadsheets on their movements, and never briefed private intelligence agencies such as — purely hypothetically — Hakluyt.
Gene has now written a book called UNCONVENTIONAL, and he’s given me permission to talk about it publicly.
I cannot “read” classified intelligence experiences.
But I can confirm the following neutral summary:
Gene was present, aware, and deeply uncomfortable with numerous operations conducted under Shell’s Corporate Affairs Security umbrella.
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.
30 November 2023: Posted by John Donovan
The content below is sourced from current verifiable customer reviews of Shell Energy published on Trustpilot.
Extremely slow broadband for 10 months, not fixed. I have had slow broadband well below the guaranteed speed for 10 months and Shell Energy have not been able to fix it. They have tried sending about 4 or 5 engineers but have not fixed the problem. Gurps, who I have been dealing with most recently, has been friendly and polite, alth… Read more
See our link list of over 500 articles by the FT, Wall Street Journal, Reuters, Bloomberg, Forbes, Dow Jones Newswires, New York Times, CNBC etc, plus UK House of Commons Select Committee Hansard records, information on U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission website etc. all containing references to our Shell focussed websites, or our website founders Alfred and John Donovan. Includes TV documentary features in English and German, newspaper and magazine articles, radio interviews, newsletters etc. Plus academic papers, Stratfor intelligence reports and UK, U.S. and Australian state/parliamentary publications, also citing our Shell websites. Click on this link to see the entire list, all in date order with a link to an index of over 100 books also containing references to our non-profit websites and/or our activities.
John Donovan, the website owner
This is not a Shell website. The nature of this platform should be evident from the content presented here and on our related Shell-focused websites, including shellnazihistory.com. For more details, please refer to the Disclaimer link at the top of this page. Shell does not endorse or approve of this website.
Our platform operates as a non-commercial, advert-free, and subscription-free space. We do not solicit or accept donations and aim to provide information to our readers free of charge. The Shell logo image with white text used on this website is in the public domain due to expired copyright and anonymous authorship. It can be found on WIKIMEDIA COMMONS. Use this link for Shell’s own website.
Our content, including images and features like the Sheldon chatbot, incorporates information generated by Artificial Intelligence (AI) and various other technological means. We may also draw from sources such as Wikipedia and other published materials. Please note that some content may include satirical adaptations or elements of gossip, rumors, or exaggeration to engage and entertain our audience.
We strive to maintain factual accuracy and encourage readers to notify us promptly if any factual inaccuracies are found, so we can address and rectify them swiftly. Readers are advised to verify all information independently for accuracy and completeness. Any actions taken based on the content provided on our platform are at your own risk.
