SHELL is slashing investment in the North Sea over a Budget Day tax hike – despite making £1.9million an hour.
The giant yesterday revealed the rise meant it was now “uneconomic” to develop smaller UK oil and gas fields.
Shell’s quarterly profits were up forty per cent and totalled £4.1billion.
Chief finance officer Simon Henry said the group would only invest in two new projects. Other work has gone. He said: “The irony is we were just beginning to look at what opportunities there were in the North Sea again. We hadn’t worked up the projects yet and that work now stops.”
The move threatens hundreds of jobs in the North Sea – and is the latest backlash to the Chancellor’s Budget Day clampdown.
George Osborne raised the tax on North Sea production from 50 to 62 per cent last month to pay for lower fuel duty for Britain’s motorists.
He said it would help fund the penny cut on Budget Day and the scrapping of a fuel tax “escalator”.
The Government is also threatening to cut tax relief on the decommissioning work needed to take rigs apart when oil fields reach the end of their life.
Shell yesterday booked a £660million charge to cover the higher UK tax hit.
But Mr Henry said it would not pass higher costs on at the pump, insisting there was no “linkage”.
The firm put its bumper first quarter results down to the high oil prices and fatter margins in Shell’s refining empire.
Mr Henry insisted it only made a penny from every litre of petrol it sells. And he hinted that pump prices could start to fall, adding: “The oil price is perhaps a little bit higher than the supply-demand position suggests it should be.”
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: 
MORE DETAILS:
A head-cut image of Alfred Donovan (now deceased) appears courtesy of The Wall Street Journal.
