Financial Times: Lively meetings
By John Plender
Published: June 28 2004 5:00 | Last Updated: June 28 2004 5:00
People have long worried about the unsatisfactory nature of annual meetings and debated what to do about it. Yet today’s Royal Dutch/Shell meetings will probably demonstrate that there is still some life in this much maligned principal-agent get-together.
Even big institutions are proposing to turn up to vent their anger at Shell’s perceived arrogance and sorry governance. It suggests that the AGM is best seen as a default mechanism. When dialogue between institutional shareholders and management has broken down, the meeting can revert to its true function of providing a forum for shareholders to hold management to account.
This happened at GlaxoSmithKline over boardroom pay and it will happen now at Shell over the energy reserves fiasco. Even when nothing happens the discipline of an annual meeting keeps boards on their mettle.
At least AGMs in Europe are less unsatisfactory than in Japan, where tomorrow two thirds of all quoted companies will hold their meetings at the same time to make it harder for sokaiyagangsters to blackmail the directors. But even in Japan investors are putting more dissident resolutions aimed at enhancing shareholder value. How very un-Japanese.
This website and sisters royaldutchshellplc.com, shellnazihistory.com, royaldutchshell.website, johndonovan.website, and shellnews.net, are owned by John Donovan. There is also a Wikipedia segment.
Royal Dutch Shell conspired directly with Hitler, financed the Nazi Party, was anti-Semitic and sold out its own Dutch Jewish employees to the Nazis. Shell had a close relationship with the Nazis during and after the reign of Sir Henri Deterding, an ardent Nazi, and the founder and decades long leader of the Royal Dutch Shell Group. His burial ceremony, which had all the trappings of a state funeral, was held at his private estate in Mecklenburg, Germany. The spectacle (photographs below) included a funeral procession led by a horse drawn funeral hearse with senior Nazis officials and senior Royal Dutch Shell directors in attendance, Nazi salutes at the graveside, swastika banners on display and wreaths and personal tributes from Adolf Hitler and Reichsmarschall, Hermann Goring. Deterding was an honored associate and supporter of Hitler and a personal friend of Goring.
Deterding was the guest of Hitler during a four day summit meeting at Berchtesgaden. Sir Henri and Hitler both had ambitions on Russian oil fields. Only an honored personal guest would be rewarded with a private four day meeting at Hitler’s mountain top retreat.
IN JULY 2007, MR BILL CAMPBELL (ABOVE, A RETIRED GROUP AUDITOR OF SHELL INTERNATIONAL SENT AN EMAIL TO EVERY UK MP AND MEMBER OF THE HOUSE OF LORDS: 
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A head-cut image of Alfred Donovan (now deceased) appears courtesy of The Wall Street Journal.
