Nick Gill
Timeline correction made on 19 Sept 2026: Nick Gill was 19 when he answered the job advert placed by John Donovan (Jan 1998), still 19 at the time of the London Evening Standard article (Sept 1998), and 20 by the time the trial opened (15 June 1999) at the Royal Courts of Justice— See pages 5 and 6 of the trial transcript.
By John Donovan
For more than a quarter of a century, my father Alfred Donovan and I became publicly associated with an extraordinary internet campaign against one of the world’s largest energy companies.
Our names appeared in newspapers. Shell executives knew who we were. Lawyers knew who we were. Whistleblowers knew where to find us.
But behind much of the machinery that allowed the campaign to function was another man whose name rarely appeared in the headlines.
Nick Gill.
This is the story of the computer “whiz kid” who answered a small newspaper advertisement and ended up helping to build and maintain an internet operation that Shell itself would later describe internally in remarkably complimentary terms.
Shell’s arch critic John Donovan has secured the website domain name for Shell PLC
One of Shell’s Amazon carbon offsets projects raises serious human rights concerns
By John Donovan
