(Russian General Prosecutor Yury Chaika left, gives a joint press conference with Natural Resources Minister Yury Trutnev in Moscow yesterday. Russia lashed out at the massive Shell-run Sakhalin Energy consortium over environmental violations)
Published: Saturday, 9 December, 2006, 10:35 AM Doha Time
MOSCOW: Oil firms operating in Russia are flouting the law to a great degree and the Royal Dutch Shell-led Sakhalin-2 project is the biggest example, Natural Resources Minister Yuri Trutnev said yesterday.
Trutnev has led a crackdown on environmental and licensing violations that has mainly targeted projects run by foreign oil firms such as Royal Dutch Shell, Exxon Mobil and TNK-BP, a joint venture of BP Plc.
Yesterday, he said more than a tenth of crude oil output in Russia, the world’s top producer in recent months, is pumped in violation of companies’ licence terms.
Analysts have interpreted his campaign as part of a wider drive by the Kremlin to boost state control over energy, with state oil and gas firms Rosneft and Gazprom gaining a competitive advantage over private and foreign rivals.
“More than 10% of oil produced in Russia is extracted in excess of the numbers agreed in project documents,” Trutnev told a meeting between his ministry and the prosecutor general’s office, which has also promised a tough line on licences.
“Our checks have discovered over 11,000 violations,” Prosecutor General Yuri Chaika told the same meeting.
Trutnev said regulators had neglected the task of keeping track of over-production and the system of controlling licence agreements had almost totally collapsed since the early 1990s.
If oilfield operators rush to produce during the years covered by their licence, they can make it harder to eke out the last barrels of reserves when a field is near depletion, a problem faced by many producers in Russia.
“As a result of the lowered vigilance on rational field exploitation, the oil recovery factor in Russia has fallen from 0.45 to 0.30 in the last 20 years,” Trutnev said, according to a text of his speech released by the ministry.
“All this is directly damaging the ecology… Sakhalin-2 has become a shining example,” said Trutnev.
Prosecutors have threatened to withdraw licences from two big gas projects operated by TNK-BP and have warned they may open a criminal case into the Shell-led Sakhalin-2 project, a $22bn venture that has undergone repeated inspections by investigators from the ministry’s environmental agency.
Russian oil production was running at 9.75mn bpd in November.
If volumes equivalent to more than 10% of that were found to amount to illicit production, Russia could theoretically cut output by 1mn bpd. By comparison, world production growth was only 900,000 bpd in 2005. – Reuters
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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.
