An eventful year for Royal Dutch Shell

Photograph of senior Shell official Richard Wiseman, right, was kindly offered and supplied by him for display on this website.This happened when he was still fond of us.

LEAFLET DISTRIBUTED TO SHELL EMPLOYEES AT THE SHELL CENTRE LONDON TODAY, MONDAY 13 DECEMBER 2010

As notified in advance to Mr Richard Wiseman, Chief Ethics & Compliance Officer of Royal Dutch Shell Plc, we today distributed leaflets (example below) to Shell employees at the Shell Centre in London.

Within minutes of arriving, a Shell security guard tried to move us on. When we politely refused, explaining that we were on public property and had notified Mr Wiseman of our intention, the security guard said he had never heard of Richard Wiseman and that we were not allowed to remain outside the main staff entrance. When we again declined to leave, he reported to a colleague that three people were issuing leaflets. I advised him that only two of us were doing so, the third person was a journalist from a daily newspaper.

Shortly thereafter, the security guard returned and said there had been a misunderstanding. The presence of the press seemed to have made an impact. He was now very polite and apologetic. Soon a more senior security guard arrived and said that there was no problem provided we did not impede entry or exit by Shell employees. He said that he was aware that we visited every year and were never any trouble.

So our visit ended on a friendly note.

THE LEAFLET

Greetings from Alfred and John Donovan, owners of the website RoyalDutchShellPlc.com

2010 has been an eventful year for Shell and our controversial website. It started with us announcing the biggest breach of employee data in history by Shell and climaxed with our publication of the WikiLeaks cables exposing Shell’s infiltration of the Nigerian government.

As a result of applications made to Shell under the Data Protection Act, the company was legally obliged to supply us with Shell internal data held about us. Some information, such as the names of Shell employees, was redacted.

One email contained this endorsement by a hapless Shell official:

“John and Alfred Donovan well known in UK/Hague. They perceive Shell played them and so have made it their mission to embarrass, belittle and criticize Shell, which they do quite well. Their website, royaldutchshellplc.com is an excellent source of group news and comment and I recommend it far above what our own group internal comms puts out.”

Last week, we contacted Richard Wiseman, the Chief Ethics & Compliance Officer of Royal Dutch Shell asking if he was the author of the endorsement. We did not receive a response. At the time of the endorsement, Mr Wiseman was less hostile to our website than he is following our recent publication of “Royal Dutch Shell Nazi Secrets” containing evidence from independent reputable sources, that Shell conspired directly with Hitler, financed the Nazi party, was anti-Semitic and sold out its own Jewish employees.

Mr Wiseman even supplied us with a photograph of himself for display on the site. We apparently also have him to thank for the blunder that allowed us to obtain sole rights to the top level domain name for the merged company, which arose from the ashes of the reserves fraud: Royal Dutch Shell Plc.

Shell internal communications revealed that Shell had set up a counter-measures team to combat our activities. We also discovered that Shell Corporate Affairs Security (“CAS”) was engaged in a global spying operation against Shell employees designed to identity employees visiting or posting information on our website and expose individuals supplying us with leaked internal information.

The espionage operations against us involved a partly FBI funded and staffed specialist unit and was conducted on an undercover basis. The same basis as the earlier industrial espionage activity conducted against us by Shell and admitted in writing by then spymaster/Legal Director Richard Wiseman, over a decade ago.

At that time, Wiseman supported corrupt, predatory behaviour by Shell executives conspiring, with the help of Shell’s legal department, to steal IT property from smaller companies. It is ironic that in his new, “poacher turned gamekeeper” role, he travels the globe making anti-corruption speeches.

The counter-measures were not successful. Soon after discovering about the global spying operation, we received from a dissident group of Shell employees a leaked global address book containing business and personal information for over 177,000 employees and contractors working for Shell. In February 2010, the Shell employee database breach became a global news story. At the request of Mr Wiseman, who feared that the release of the information could imperil the safety of some employees, we destroyed the database.

More recently, we published numerous Shell internal emails supplied to us by a dissident group of Shell employees involved in the controversial Corrib Gas Project in Ireland. When Shell attempted to trace the people leaking the emails, death threats were allegedly made against Shell employees, which we reported to the Irish Police.

In June, we broke the news of the Shell settlement for $15.5 million of the US court case brought by relatives of Ken Saro-Wiwa. The settlement prevented evidence of Shell’s involvement in alleged murder, torture, and other human rights crimes, being heard in open court. However, on 9 November 2010, citing leaked Shell internal documents from the court case, the Guardian newspaper reported that Shell senior management was so concerned about potential reputational fallout from association with the judicial murder of Saro-Wiwa that it seriously contemplated changing the brand name to “New Shell”.

On 7 October 2010, we published an article: “U.S. Dept. of Defense Confirms NCIS Espionage Investigation of Shell”. Following email correspondence with a U.S. intelligence source, and clearance obtained by that source from Dept. of Defense attorneys, the source was authorized to confirm to us that an investigation directed at Shell Oil USA had indeed been initiated by the US Department of the Navy, Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS). Shell is alleged to have engaged in industrial espionage in an attempt to gain control over intellectual property owned by a former Shell Oil employee.

In November, we published a Cease and Desist Order imposed on Royal Dutch Shell by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission concerning bribery and corruption in Nigeria. Shell agreed to pay $48 million in civil and criminal fines.

Earlier this month, courtesy of WikilLeaks, we published secret U.S. cables revealing claims by Ann Pickard, then Shell’s Regional VP for Sub Sahara Africa, that Shell had infiltrated agents into every Nigerian ministry affecting its operations in Nigeria. Bearing in mind the recent news of Shell getting further into bed with the Russian mafia (the Russian government as defined in WikiLeaks cables), President Putin will be concerned about her request for help from US intelligence in relation to Gazprom, the controlling partner in Sak2.

Shell has also been in bed with a succession of corrupt Nigerian dictators and with leaders of militant groups attacking Shell installations. The attacks’, by coincidence or otherwise, seem to occur whenever the price of oil starts to fall.

A few days ago news broke that Shell Oil General Counsel Gale Norton has escaped prosecution on corruption charges, apparently due to an absence of “conclusive evidence”. The investigation revealed that Shell benefited from “irregularities” in the way oil leases were awarded when she was Interior Secretary in the George W. Bush government, just before joining Shell. Norton was asked to answer follow-up questions from the investigators, but “never responded”. An official report also said that on two separate occasions after she had left the Interior Department, Norton “failed to fully describe her role in the leasing program to DOI ethics officials.” The smell of corruption surrounding Shell Oil and Gale Norton continues. What happened to honesty, integrity and transparency?

WE WISH ALL SHELL EMPLOYEES A HAPPY CHRISTMAS & A NEW YEAR IN WHICH WE HOPE NONE OF YOU WILL BE COMPELLED TO REAPPLY FOR YOUR OWN JOBS.

Published by Alfred and John Donovan: December 2010