Financial Times: Mudlark: ABB man to show and tell for Shell
“Royal Dutch Shell has gone Nordic again, this time to fill its top communications job. Björn Edlund from the Swiss-Swedish engineering group ABB will become vice-president for media and communications on October 1.”
Posted 13 Sept 2005
By Clay Harris
Published: September 12 2005
(EXTRACT RELATING TO SHELL)
Royal Dutch Shell has gone Nordic again, this time to fill its top communications job. Björn Edlund from the Swiss-Swedish engineering group ABB will become vice-president for media and communications on October 1. The Swede’s appointment, filling a plum vacancy in European corpcomms, follows Shell’s choice of a Finn, Nokia chief executive Jorma Ollila, as chairman from June next year.
Edlund will be reunited with chief financial officer Peter Voser, another ABB alumnus who came back to Shell in 2004. In charge of external and internal communications, he will report to Roxanne Decyk, head of a new corporate affairs directorate.
Mary Jo Jacobi, Shell’s current vice-president for external affairs, decided to leave the group, in part because she did not move from London to The Hague. (Mudlark, June 24). She this year was appointed a civil service commissioner and married Patrick Jephson, former private secretary to Diana, Princess of Wales.
Before ABB, Edlund, 55, ran a consultancy in Switzerland and was head of communications at the Swiss drugs group Sandoz. He was formerly a Reuters and UPI journalist.
The Shell that Edlund joins has one parallel to his current employer. It unified its corporate structure this summer, replacing an alliance of Dutch and UK companies that was nearly a century old. ABB was created by the merger in 1988 of Sweden’s Asea and the Swiss BBC Brown Boveri. It initially tried a dual structure, but finally unified in Sweden in 1999.
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.
