MILAN, Sept 18 (Reuters) – Oil majors Shell and Eni will be carefully monitoring a first ruling this week by a Milan judge in one of the energy industry’s biggest corruption scandals for clues to what might be round the corner for them.

The two companies are embroiled in a long-running graft case revolving around the purchase in 2011 of one of Africa’s biggest oilfields – Nigeria’s OPL 245 – for about $1.3 billion.

The case, which involves Eni CEO Claudio Descalzi and four former Shell managers including one-time Shell Foundation Chairman Malcolm Brinded, has spawned legal cases spanning several countries and is expected to drag on for months. read more

The trial starts this week, with defendants that include former Shell Vice President for sub-Saharan Africa Peter Robinson, and former company board member Malcolm Brinded.

LONDON—Senior executives from oil giants Royal Dutch Shell and Eni are facing corruption charges in Milan over a $1.3 billion deal for a huge African oil field.

Italian prosecutors allege that $1.1 billion from the deal didn’t go to Nigeria, where the oil field OPL 245 is located, but to accounts belonging to former oil lawmaker Dan Etete. Etete is accused of subsequently distributing hundreds of millions of dollars to others as bribes, including to former Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan. read more

Time running out for prosecutors to obtain potentially crucial documents seized in Geneva apartment raid

Ben Chapman: @b_c_chapman

Giant oil companies, offshore accounts, ex-MI6 agents, champagne lunches, a former Nigerian president and allegations of one of the biggest bribes ever paid – the corruption case against Shell and Italy’s Eni filed by prosecutors in Milan over a shady $1.3bn deal for a vast African oil field has could have been lifted from the pages of an espionage thriller.

The latest developments thicken the plot further with a cache of documents seized in a raid on a Swiss financier’s apartment that could be crucial to the case, leaving prosecutors in a race against time to get them to Milan as trial hearings get underway this week.

The Geneva raid uncovered a briefcase belonging to Emeka Obi, a middleman who received millions of dollars from the deal and is in the dock along with several senior Shell and Eni executives.

Inside the briefcase, Swiss prosecutors found a laptop, two Nigerian passports, five sim cards and a hard drive containing 41,000 documents that prosecutors believe could be crucial to the trial playing out on the other side of the Alps. read more

Article published by The New York Times 16 Sept 2018

OIL INDUSTRY

Corruption trial of major oil companies resumes.

On Tuesday, the trial of two large oil companies, Royal Dutch Shell and Italy’s Eni, is expected to resume at a court in Milan after a summer break. The first session would most likely be devoted to procedural issues, but prosecutors are expected to lay out their case in the weeks ahead. Prosecutors are charging the companies with corruption over a deal for an offshore oil exploration tract off Nigeria. Both companies have denied wrongdoing. read more

EMAIL BEING SENT THIS WEEKEND TO EVERY UK MP. 

Justin Welby, Archbishop of Hypocrisy

Justin Welby is in hot water again. He has criticised another controversial company, last time Wonga and this time the tax-shy Amazon. Both later embarrassingly revealed to be businesses in which the Church of England is an investor. 

BBC Newsnight aired a package on Friday 14 Sept drawing attention to the subject and the Church of England’s numerous questionable investments. In particular, its holdings in BP and Shell, both described as being toxic. 

I can speak with some authority in relation to the toxicity of Shell. read more

The Canadian Press: Hina Alam: September 13, 2018: 4:23 PM EDT: Last Updated September 13, 2018. 7:32 PM EDTVANCOUVER — Shell Canada Ltd. has given up its offshore exploration rights, clearing the way for the creation of Canada’s first protected marine area under the Canada Wildlife Act. The company voluntarily released permits for about 50,000 square kilometres in an area off British Columbia’s coast to allow for the creation of the Scott Islands marine National Wildlife Area. FULL ARTICLE read more

Sir Henri Deterding was Director General of the Royal Dutch Shell Group when his initial massive donation of food to Nazi Germany was announced in a Reuter’s Wireless report dated 20 December 1936. 

The donated food on that occasion filled 7,000 railway wagons.

Despite criticism in the news media, specifically linking the money saved on food to Nazi rearmament, Deterding continued to donate Dutch food for Nazi Germany, where he now lived after marrying his secretary, a young German woman. Like him, an ardent Nazi.  read more

Printed below is an English translation of an article published today by the Dutch Financial Times, Financieele Dagblad. 

Maarten Wetselaar: ‘There has been a period of thirty years in which the industry and we also only talked about the largest oil platforms that were built and the deepest wells that were drilled.’ Photo: Michel de Groot

‘The energy transition gives power back to the customer’

Bert van Dijk: Energy: 12 Sept 2018

ShellRDSA € 27.85 + 1.05% is still an oil and gas multinational, but is sorting for a future in which it will become one of the largest electricity companies. ‘We are faced with a revolution’, says Maarten Wetselaar, member of the Executive Board of Shell in an interview with the FD. He is responsible, among other things, for the New Energies division that was established two years ago. read more

In evidence to the Committee, Shell stated that neither Shell Petroleum Development Company (SPDC) nor Royal Dutch Shell (RDS) “is or was at any point in the past involved in OPL 245”. But a cache of leaked internal Shell emails tells a very different story. Far from being “uninvolved”, RDS — the London-registered company at the pinnacle of the Shell group — appears to have the controlling mind behind the important decisions relating to Shell’s involvement in OPL 245.

BY SAHARAREPORTERS, NEW YORK, SEP 11, 2018

Anti-corruption groups are calling for an urgent inquiry into what would appear to be highly misleading statements made by Shell in evidence to an investigation by the 2012 Ad Hoc Committee of the House of Representatives into the corrupt OPL 245 oil bloc deal.

In evidence to the Committee, Shell stated that that neither Shell Petroleum Development Company (SPDC) nor Royal Dutch Shell (RDS) “is or was at any point in the past involved in OPL 245”.

But a cache of leaked internal Shell emails tells a very different story. Far from being “uninvolved”, RDS — the London-registered company at the pinnacle of the Shell group — appears to have the controlling mind behind the important decisions relating to Shell’s involvement in OPL 245. read more

Royal Dutch Shell should apologise for antisemitic conduct and Nazi support

By John Donovan

I strongly believe that Royal Dutch Shell should be held accountable for its outrageous antisemitic actions against its own employees, which cost some of them their lives. The same applies to Shell’s huge financial support for Nazi Germany that contributed to the deaths of some 50 million victims in WW2 including those poor souls who perished in the Holocaust. Shell’s leader, Sir Henri Deterding, was an ardent Nazi feted by Adolf Hitler. Shell has never apologised or expressed any remorse.  read more

In 2008, the then Shell CEO Jeroen van der Veer (above) forecast that “Demand for oil and gas would outstrip demand within 7 years

By John Donovan

According to an article published by the Houston Chronicle – Is peak oil demand coming soon – Royal Dutch Shell now forecasts that crude oil demand will crest in the late 2020s.

It is salient to note that in 2008, the then Shell CEO Jeroen van der Veer forecast that “Demand for oil and gas will outstrip demand within 7 years… see below. read more

Printed below is an English translation of an article published today by the Dutch Financial Times, Financieele Dagblad. 

Shell is investing $ 200 million in The Hague campus

The headquarters of Shell in The Hague. Photo: Peter Hilz / HH

Bert van Dijk: 10 Sept 2018

Oil and gas multinational Shell RDSA € 27.20-0.44% will invest more than $ 200 million in a new Shell campus in The Hague in the coming years. It concerns the renovation and expansion of the current monumental headquarters of the company on the Carel van Bylandtlaan. The company also expects to create hundreds of new jobs in the New Energies division in the coming years, the global headquarters of which will be on the new campus. Shell announced this today.

The New Energies branch focuses, among other things, on forms of energy that emit less CO2, such as solar and wind energy and biofuels. The division investigates new commercial models that the company can apply in the global energy transition. read more

Ben Marlow, executive business editor: 9 SEPTEMBER 2018 • 8:39PM

Like a pair of mysterious soothsayers, Maarten Wetselaar and John Abbott are peering into the future. The world they see is almost unrecognisable from the one we inhabit today, and yet it is only just around the corner. In the west, the petrol car has become obsolete. Lorries are powered by liquid natural gas. Freight liners criss-cross the oceans fuelled by hydrogen. Solar and wind provide the energy to our homes. And the petrol station has been reimagined as an unlikely retail hotspot where people routinely gather to do their food shopping, pick up parcels, and sip artisan coffee. A convoy of vehicles are being rebooted at one of many charging points on the forecourt. FULL ARTICLE read more

In February 2007, someone at Shell stated an intention in an internal email dated 2 February 2007, to put pressure on The Sunday Times to “kill” an article about our intervention in the Sakhalin 2 project (which according to The Sunday Times article cost Shell £11 BILLION).

Extracts from the ebook “John Donovan, Shell’s Nightmare” (now available on Amazon websites globally)

Extracts from pages 168 to 170 inclusive

We also discovered that from 2006 onwards Shell secretly kept and regularly updated “Focal Point” information about our activities. Some of the information in the reports is inaccurate.

We have copies of reports updated in 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009 and 2010. I have supplied one example from each year.

The “Focal Point” seems to be a person rather than the title of the document. I believe the person was Xxxxxxx Xxxxxxx.

It is plain from the reports that there was anxiety at Shell about the possibility that I would ask a question at the AGM. A list of possible questions and rehearsals of responses are listed in the Focal Point reports. read more

A British criminal lawyer, Michael Birnbaum QC, who observed the trial, concluded that it was deeply unfair. “The judgement of the Tribunal is not merely wrong, illogical or perverse. It is downright dishonest. The Tribunal consistently advanced arguments which no experienced lawyer could possibly believe to be logical or just. I believe that the Tribunal first decided on its verdict and then sought for arguments to justify them. No barrel was too deep to be scraped.”

Extracts from pages 33 & 34 of an Amnesty International document entitled: “A CRIMINAL ENTERPRISE? SHELL’S INVOLVEMENT IN HUMAN RIGHTS VIOLATIONS IN NIGERIA IN THE 1990s”

OGONI 9: UNFAIR TRIAL AND EXECUTION

On 6 February 1995, Ken Saro-Wiwa, Dr Barinem Kiobel and the other prisoners were allowed to see their lawyers for the first time since their arrest in May the previous year.136 They were put on trial by a specially constituted tribunal – The Civil Disturbances Tribunal. Ken Saro-Wiwa, Barinem Kiobel, John Kpuinen, and Saro-Wiwa’s deputy in MOSOP, Ledum Mitee, were accused of inciting the murders. The other men were accused of carrying them out. They all faced the death penalty and were denied the chance to appeal. read more

By Vanand Meliksetian – Sep 04, 2018, 3:00 PM CDT

Royal Dutch Shell has invested significantly in LNG with its takeover of British Gas in 2016. The acquisition of BG for more than $50 billion provided the Dutch company with a head start during a period when prices were low. Shell’s capacity in the LNG industry is nearly double compared to its nearest competitor. The company’s value currently is $53 billion less than Exxon’s, the largest oil and gas company in the world. Before the deal, the difference was more than $150 billion. FULL ARTICLE read more