Daily Telegraph: City comment: For a company that has so long considered itself top of the heap in the oil game, the humiliation inside can only be guessed at. Even Jeroen van der Veer, Shell’s top executive, had to admit the business was in crisis…”: “Shell’s slide show was ghastly. Meaningless management-speak phrases such as “fix and reset the business” and “growth in markets of choice” might have been designed to reassure, but instead showed that Shell’s problems extend beyond its reserves issue.”
Edited by Neil Collins
(Filed: 23/09/2004)
We’ll be running to standstill until 2009, says Shell
Shell unveiled its three-year plan in the appropriately-named Plaisterers’ Hall yesterday. Under a coat of arms with the motto ‘let brotherly love continue’, the shell-shocked senior executives did their best to cover up the cracks with smooth-finish plaster.
Alas, their efforts managed nothing of the kind. Desperate not to make promises that might not be met, the best that they could do was to project maintained production until 2009, by which time some of the results of spending $45billion on holes in the ground might be flowing through.
For a company that has so long considered itself top of the heap in the oil game, the humiliation inside can only be guessed at. Even Jeroen van der Veer, Shell’s top executive, had to admit the business was in crisis, after the admission earlier this year that nearly one in four of its “proven” barrels of oil and gas were not.
Shell’s slide show was ghastly. Meaningless management-speak phrases such as “fix and reset the business” and “growth in markets of choice” might have been designed to reassure, but instead showed that Shell’s problems extend beyond its reserves issue. It’s clear that those overbooked reserves will not be quickly replaced. This, the result of deciding not to spend money looking for new sources in the late 90s, was an admission that Shell’s handsome return on capital then now looks more like a return of capital today.
Painfully absent from yesterday’s presentation was any hint about reform of its introverted and outdated board structure. For that, we must wait until November, by which time one of the obviously successful models at Reed Elsevier or Rio Tinto should surely have been adopted – unless, of course, the Royal Dutch contingent blocks it.
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.
