By Rob Davies: PUBLISHED 22 May 2013
Investors joined environmental protesters in giving Royal Dutch Shell a slap on the wrists, as a tenth of them failed to back the oil giant’s pay arrangements.
In what is likely to be chief executive Peter Voser’s last annual meeting before he retires, some 10 per cent of shareholders snubbed the remuneration report.
The vote comes just days after Shell’s London offices were raided in a European Commission investigation into oil price fixing.
And it meant that Voser – who will retire in early 2014 – bowed out of his last shareholder meeting in uneasy circumstances.
The Swiss, who is retiring to enjoy a ‘change of lifestyle’, took home a pay package worth up to £8m last year, depending on the outcome of bonus targets over several years.
That was despite shelving the company’s Arctic drilling plans, which has already sucked up £3bn of Shell’s cash, in the wake of several accidents.
The Anglo-Dutch ‘supermajor’ – the world’s second largest listed oil company by production – has also been caught up in a European Commission probe into oil price fixing, although it emerged after the close of the financial year.
The annual meeting – in The Hague, Holland – also attracted protest from groups complaining about Shell’s plans to exploit Canada’s tar sands.
Members of the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation, a native American group suing Shell (up 34.5p to 2260p) over plans to develop on their ancestral land, confronted board members at the meeting. And Mae R Hank, tribal member of the Native Village of Point Hope, Alaska, criticised the firm’s Arctic drilling plans.
‘If an oil spill were to occur in the Arctic’s extreme conditions, there is no proven method to clean it up during winter,’ she said.
Chairman Jorma Ollila said Shell’s nominations committee had begun the hunt for a new chief executive, declaring ‘the process has started’.
Chief financial officer Simon Henry is thought to the front-runner, given Shell’s traditional policy of promoting company ‘lifers’ from within. Marvin Odum, head of upstream operations in the Americas, is also a contender to be the firm’s first boss from the US.
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.
