From our October 2004 Shell News Archive
The Independent On Sunday (UK): Tarnished Shell seeks to be born again
Tim Webb on the oil giant’s attempts to put scandal behind it and give itself a facelift: “Shell directors have spent the last year reading the newspapers about how bad they are,” he says. “The last thing they want to read is that they have failed again.”
24 October 2004
Shell is expected to outdo its rival, BP, when it announces higher third- quarter earnings this week. In fact, it has already earned more than BP this year, which isn’t bad for such a “troubled” company.
It underlines the fact that the Anglo-Dutch company has continued to perform financially despite spending most of the year mired in controversy. This is the same Shell which in the past six months has seen its chairman, exploration chief and finance director leave after a fifth of its proven oil and gas reserves were found to be wrongly booked. And it is the same company whose new chairman, Jeroen van der Veer, vowed last month at its annual strategy meeting: “Much more needs to be done. We are driving Shell to be a different company.”