Читать книгу The Squeeze: Oil, Money and Greed in the 21st Century - Tom Bower - Страница 9

Shell’s directors congratulated themselves on scoring a hit against those disrupting the Brent oil trade. There was a shared pride among the company’s long-time employees about their company’s probity and purpose. Built by Dutch engineers and Scottish accountants, nothing was decided in haste. Decisions were taken only after all the circumstances and consequences had been considered and the benefit to the value chain was irrefutable. Although BP might produce more oil, Shell earned higher profits.

Reared on that tradition, Chris Fay was bullish. With 23 years’ experience in Nigeria, Malaysia and Scandinavia, Fay had become the chairman of Shell’s operations in Britain. Shell’s ten oil-producing fields in the North Sea and others under development were his responsibility. Among the problems he inherited in 1993 was the fate of Brent Spar, a platform in the North Sea used to load crude onto tankers. Erected in 1976, the 65,000-ton, 462-foot-high structure had been decommissioned in 1991, and by 1994 was no longer safe. Dismantling it was a problem. There was no suitable British inshore site, while dismantling at sea would cost $69 million. Shell’s engineers had considered 13 options offered by different organisations, and Fay had discussed the alternatives with Tim Eggar, the Conservative minister for energy. With the government’s public approval, Fay confirmed on 27 February 1995 that the platform would be towed 150 miles into the Atlantic and, using explosives to detonate the ballast tanks, would be sunk in 6,600 feet of water. The cost would be $18 million. The only downside of the apparently uncomplicated process was that the metal, alongside innumerable shipwrecks on the sea bed, would take 4,000 years to disintegrate. Neither Fay nor Eggar was concerned. Over a hundred similar structures had been dumped by American oil companies in the sea without protest, creating artificial reefs off Texas and Louisiana. ‘This is a good example of deep-sea disposal,’ claimed Eggar, anticipating that the Brent Spar’s disposal would be followed by that of 400 other North Sea structures.

Two months later, at lunchtime on 30 April 1995, four Greenpeace activists jumped from the Greenpeace ship Moby Dick and occupied the derelict Brent Spar. The rig, announced Greenpeace, was filled with 5,500 tons of toxic oil which would escape and contaminate the sea and kill marine life if it was sunk. Media organisations around the world were offered film of the occupation, with close-ups of Shell’s staff aiming high-pressure water hoses at the protestors. Any viewer who doubted that Shell was the aggressor was reminded by Greenpeace about the company’s poor environmental record. In March 1978 the Amoco Cadiz, a tanker carrying a cargo of 220,000 tons of oil, broke up in the English Channel, contaminating the French coastline. Shell owned the oil and was blamed for the disaster, a tenuous link motivated by anger at Shell’s refusal to boycott South Africa during the apartheid era and by its supply of oil to Rhodesia’s rebellious white settlers despite international sanctions after they declared independence in 1965. The accumulated anger against Shell took Fay and his co-directors in London and The Hague by surprise, especially the accusation that Shell was untrustworthy. Taking the lead from Lo van Wachem, the former chairman of Shell’s committee of managing directors, who remained on the board of directors, Shell had already declared its ambition to lead the industry in the protection of the environment. In advertisements and meetings, directors mentioned the possibility of withdrawing from some activities to avoid gambling with the company’s reputation. This commitment had been disparaged by Greenpeace. To gain sympathisers, the environmental movement was intent on entrenching its disagreements with the oil companies.

Fay and his executives knew that Greenpeace’s allegations were untrue: the platform contained no more than 50 tons of harmless sludge and sand. Greenpeace, they were convinced, had invented the toxic danger as part of its long campaign that mankind should stop using fossil fuels. The battle lines had been drawn after Shell’s spokesmen, in common with Exxon’s and BP’s, had dismissed any link between fossil fuel and damage to the environment. Convinced that the truth would neutralise the Brent Spar protest, Fay appeared on television. But, unprepared for Greenpeace’s counter-allegation that Shell was deliberately concealing internal reports describing the toxic inventory, he visibly reeled, fatally damaging Shell’s image. His personal misfortune reflected Shell’s inherent weaknesses, especially its governance.

The historic division of the Anglo-Dutch company had never been resolved. In 1907 Henry Deterding, a mercurial Dutchman who had gambled with oilfields, investing in Russia, Mexico, Venezuela and California, had negotiated the merger between his own company, Royal Dutch, and Shell Transport, a British company, on advantageous terms giving the Dutch 60 per cent of Royal Dutch Shell. The company’s management, however, had remained divided. Two boards of directors – one Dutch and the other British – met once a month for a day ‘in conference’. Each meeting was meticulously prepared, but serious discussions among the 30 people in the room – 20 directors and 10 officials – were rare. Each director could normally speak only once during these meetings which, remarkably, lacked any formal status. After the ‘conference’ the two national boards separated and made decisions based on the conference’s discussion. Aware that the company had become renowned during the 1970s as a vast colossus employing eccentric people enjoying a unique culture, van Wachem, a self-righteous, abrasive chairman, had imposed some reforms while acknowledging that Shell’s dismaying history had inflamed Greenpeace’s protest. Henry Deterding, infatuated with Hitler, had negotiated without consulting his directors to guarantee oil supplies to Nazi Germany, and in 1936 he retired to live in Germany. After the war, to remove the concentration of authority in one man, the company had created a committee of managing directors with limited powers to influence Shell’s directors. That barely affected the inscrutable aura of an aloof international group of interlinked but autonomous companies immersed in engineering, trade and diplomacy.

As the friends of presidents and kings, Shell’s chairmen did not merely control oilfields, but sought influence over governments. Supported by a planning department to project the corporation’s power, Shell’s country chairmen in Brunei, Qatar, Nigeria and across the Middle East wielded authority akin to that of a sovereign. Yet beyond public view, Shell’s employees worked in a non-hierarchical, teamlike atmosphere, exalting technology and engineers who, in the interests of the industry and Shell’s reputation, occasionally donated their patents and expertise for the industry’s common good. That collaborative attitude was proudly contrasted with Exxon’s. Unlike the American directors, whose principal task was to earn profits for their shareholders, Shell had proudly enjoyed its status during the 1980s as a defensive stock – shares which remained a safe investment even in the worst economic recession. Shareholders were tolerated as a necessary evil, and modern management techniques were disdained, emphasising the company’s increasing dysfunctionality. ‘I’m not saying we enjoyed it,’ said van Wachem about the 1986 collapse in oil prices, ‘but there was no panic.’ With more than $9 billion in cash on the balance sheet, van Wachem’s strategic task appeared uncontroversial. Shell owned Europe’s biggest and most profitable refining and marketing operation, and Shell Oil was the most successful discoverer of new oil in the USA. Nevertheless, van Wachem’s poor investment decisions, combined with a fatal explosion at a refinery at Norco, Louisiana, in 1988, had hit Shell’s profits. In 1990 they fell by 48 per cent in the US, and net income in 1991 collapsed by 98 per cent, from $1.04 billion to $20 million, far worse than its rivals. Shell’s poor finances had compelled the sale of oilfields to Tullow and Cairn, two independent companies, and making 15 per cent of the American workforce redundant.

Lo van Wachem’s ragged bequest was inherited in 1993 by Cor Herkströter. The very qualities of Herkströter which attracted praise in Holland led to criticism of him in London and New York as a socially inept, cumbersome introvert whose disdain for financial markets was matched by a conviction that he was God. Content that Shell produced more oil than Exxon and enjoyed a bigger turnover, Herkströter did not initially feel impelled to close a more important gap. By limiting the influence of accountants and advocates of commercial calculations, Shell earned less per barrel of oil than Exxon. Although Shell’s capitalisation was $30 billion more than Exxon’s, the world’s biggest oil company had earned lower profits than its rival since 1981. Complications and compromises had reduced the company’s competitiveness and increased costs. For nearly 20 years, to avoid making unpleasant business-related decisions, Shell had chosen to follow a path of consensus. Emollience was particularly favoured by the Dutch. Although Dutch shareholders owned only 10 per cent of the stock, and over 50 per cent was owned by shareholders in the US and Britain, the Dutch directors disproportionately dominated the company, encouraging its fragmentation between different cultures – Dutch, British and American – and also between the different departments – upstream, downstream and chemicals. To his credit, by May 1994 Herkströter, unlike his more conservative Dutch directors, recognised Shell’s sickness. Calling together 50 executives to review the company’s financial performance, Herkströter concluded that Shell had become ‘bureaucratic, inward-looking, complacent, self-satisfied, arrogant … technocentric and insufficiently entrepreneurial’, all of which was stifling efficiency and the search for new oil. The same sclerosis undermined his authority when Greenpeace boarded the Brent Spar.

‘People realise this is wrong,’ explained Peter Melchett, Greenpeace’s executive director. ‘It is immoral. It is treating the sea as a dustbin.’ Greenpeace’s accusation had aroused public antagonism against Big Oil. All the oil majors were linked with Shell as untrustworthy, environmental spoilers. Across Germany, Shell’s petrol stations were boycotted. In Holland, managers reported that a similar boycott was crippling their operation. The decentralised company had never anticipated that a decision in one country could trigger violent protests in another. Even though the directors knew that Melchett lacked any evidence to undermine Fay’s honest explanation that the platform’s tanks had been cleaned in 1991, the oil executive’s humiliation on BBC television had echoed across Europe. Like his fellow directors, Herkströter was destabilised by accusations of Shell’s dishonesty and by angry disagreements between the company’s managers. In particular, Herkströter was stunned when Shell staff in Germany leaked material to the media to embarrass the company’s senior executives in Holland.

In the House of Commons, British prime minister John Major, unaware of Shell’s internal warfare, solidly defended the corporation. As he spoke, Herkströter and his fellow directors, shaken by the boycott and the demand by European politicians, especially Helmut Kohl, Germany’s chancellor, that Shell abandon its plans, collapsed. Just after Major’s public justification of the disposal of Brent Spar, Shell’s board in The Hague capitulated. ‘They caved in under pressure,’ complained Michael Heseltine, the secretary of state for trade and industry, outraged after Fay telephoned and ordered the British government to cease interfering in his company’s business.

The platform was towed to Erfjord, near Stavanger, and dismantling started in July 1995. Melchett was invited to inspect the contents of the tanks, and was shown to have been mistaken. ‘I apologise to you and your colleagues over this,’ he said publicly after negotiations. ‘It was an honest mistake,’ said Paul Horsman, the leader of Greenpeace’s campaign. Although Shell was vindicated, Herkströter did not recover from the stumble. Shell’s directors were exposed as weak – one even said, ‘Greenpeace did a wonderful job’ – while Greenpeace, refusing to concede the high ground, invented a more serious campaign to recover its credibility.

In 1995, the jewel in Shell’s crown was Nigeria. Signed in 1958, Shell’s original deal with the country was hugely profitable. The corporation paid the Nigerian government $2 for each barrel, regardless of the world price, until it reached $100. Thereafter, the royalty was $2.50. Beyond that minimal amount, Shell pocketed the remainder. War and corruption had eroded that windfall over the years. Historically there was no reason why 240 ethnic groups, Christian and Muslim, could exist within a single nation of 140 million people. Oil underpinned the artificial unity that had been constructed by the British colonial government, and keeping that fragile coalition together was the central government’s priority. Any threat of succession was unacceptable, especially that declared in 1967 by General Ojukwu, the leader of the oil-rich eastern region of Biafra. Knowing that the country would disintegrate without oil, the government in Lagos launched a war to crush the rebels. Over three years, Biafra and Shell’s operation were devastated. The recovery after 1970 had been sporadic. The new income created a mirage of universal wealth. If oil sold at $25 a barrel, each Nigerian citizen would benefit, although by only 50 cents per week at most. But even those profits were wasted by the government on white-elephant projects, including an outdated steel mill purchased from Russia. Simultaneously, the new wealth sucked in imports and destroyed local jobs. To alleviate the social upheaval, Shell built hospitals, schools and social centres. Contrary to advice, Shell’s local country chairmen refused to consult the aid agencies and non-governmental organisations about these projects. Rashly, Shell’s executives assumed that the government would provide teachers, doctors and nurses.

By 1992 Shell’s 5,000 Nigerian staff, 20,000 contractors and 270 expatriate staff had rebuilt most of the wells, replaced equipment destroyed during the war and sought to compensate for losses. But, in the rush for oil, Shell applied standards that would have been unacceptable in Europe or America. Toxic gas was flared from the wells, and oil spills, seeping across farmland and rivers, remained untreated. Nevertheless, only one million barrels of oil a day, half of Nigeria’s capacity, was produced, and even that was affected by corruption. Every year the company’s auditors arrived from Europe to unearth endemic corruption among the company’s local employees. Systematically, some of Shell’s Nigeria managers gave contracts to friends and received backhanders, or paid inflated invoices and pocketed the cash. The auditors found hefty sums paid for ‘travel expenses’ to politicians and government officials and their families. Usually the same expenses were also paid by the government, and the officials kept the difference. At the top level, vast sums of money received from Shell in royalties and taxes were diverted by Nigeria’s politicians and officials to private offshore bank accounts. Brian Lavers, Shell’s country chairman until 1991, had been under pressure to pay bribes to government officials and local chiefs. To avoid participating in any illegal activity, Shell’s board agreed to pay middlemen, farmers and tribal chiefs as ‘consultants’ and for ‘services’ to build social amenities including schools, roads and cinemas. Beyond the company’s control, these were constructed for inflated prices, allowing Shell’s local managers and their friends to steal considerable sums of money. Despite his equally fierce opposition to the Nigerian government’s corruption, Philip Watts, Lavers’s successor, had no alternative but to reluctantly agree under pressure in 1991 to expand Shell’s operation in the country. The company increased the number of rigs searching for oil from seven to 22, agreed to pay higher royalties and, critically, agreed in return for a bonus to increase the country’s officially registered oil reserves from 16 billion barrels to 25 billion barrels. ‘I arrived in this job,’ said Watts, ‘absolutely determined to make a difference on issues I felt strongly about. You’re talking to someone who was in the eye of the storm.’

Bureaucracy, inflation, ageing equipment, pollution and soaring taxes amid general lawlessness were just part of Watts’s inheritance. Watts, a seismologist, had worked in Borneo, the Gulf of Mexico, the North Sea and Holland before arriving in Nigeria. Intelligent and opinionated, he was intolerant of those he disdained, not least the local criminals. Oil had turned Nigeria into a magnet for villainy. In the Niger delta, 40,000 square miles of swamps and creeks where the Niger flows into the Atlantic, gangs of Ogoni tribesmen were systematically drilling into Shell’s pipelines to divert up to 80,000 barrels of oil every day into barges moored on the creeks. The cargoes were sold to untraceable tankers, chartered by European traders, anchored in the delta or offshore and resold to uninquisitive refineries, especially in nearby Ghana. The European traders could also be the victims. Lured by a succession of telephone calls, a Glencore representative arrived in Nigeria carrying a suitcase filled with several million dollars in cash to buy oil. After the suitcase was handed over, the ‘sellers’ disappeared. If that misfortune gave Watts wry amusement, the Ogoni gangs’ activities caused headaches. Explosions while siphoning oil caused numerous deaths, and the thefts from pipelines caused spillage across farmland and in rivers. The environmental damage placed Shell under pressure to pay compensation to farmers, which in turn encouraged some of them to sabotage pipes in order to claim compensation. Attempts by Watts to crack down on corruption, theft and sabotage endangered Shell’s employees. Increasingly, they could only work if protected by armed militias. Continued civil unrest forced many oil wells to close down. 2,470 security officers were employed to protect the operational staff. Although Shell’s directors in Holland condemned the use of guns as ‘intolerable’, the nature of the corruption in Nigeria left no alternative.

‘There’s a staggering skimming of government funds paid straight into Swiss bank accounts,’ Watts exploded. Since each Shell ‘country’ was self-financing for expansion, Watts’s ambitions were frustrated by the government’s refusal to pay Nigeria’s share of the bill. Most of the $7 billion received every year by the government in taxes and royalties simply disappeared. Hundreds of millions of dollars which the government was contractually obliged to contribute to develop new reserves had been deposited in Swiss bank accounts by corrupt officials. A succession of ministers, Watts discovered, had ‘not only stolen the eggs but refused to even feed the goose’. In the face of wholesale corruption, even Nigeria’s banks refused Shell’s requests for loans and overdrafts. Watts’s predicament was complicated in December 1993 by a military coup led by General Sani Abacha and the slump of Nigerian oil prices to $12. The new dictator repressed striking protestors and arrested the trade unions’ leaders in the oilfields, but failed to address Shell’s complaints. Exasperated, Watts threatened the minister of finance and the governor of the central bank. ‘If we can’t pay wages or finance our development,’ he warned, ‘I’ll make sure it’ll be in the press. Even my driver will be protesting in the street.’ Talking tough appealed to Watts, although the corporation’s conflict of interests – eagerness for more oil, collaboration with corrupt rulers, disregard for tribal sensitivities and discounting the social damage caused by the oil spillages – could not be disguised during an international protest.

In 1990, Ken Saro-Wiwa, a 49-year-old writer and poet, launched a campaign outside Nigeria on behalf of the Ogoni tribe, who inhabited 1.3 per cent of the oil-rich delta and produced 1.5 per cent of Nigeria’s oil. After 30 years of oil production, the Ogonis’ farmland, water and air were polluted by oil spillages and the ‘acid rain’ produced from the gas flaring above their crops and villages. In compensation, they received little income from the oil royalties. With Shell’s knowledge, central government ministers refused to remit even the agreed 1 per cent of the revenue to the locality, and national politicians never visited the region. Until he extended his campaign against the Nigerian government to America and Europe, Saro-Wiwa’s efforts had been fruitless. But the crusade and his encouragement of an armed uprising in the delta altered Shell’s relationship with the government. The Biafran experience had taught the company that any interference with oil revenues, or any demand for secession, would be squashed.

To protect Shell’s oilfields, Watts felt justified in appealing to the government for protection from constant vandalism. ‘We’re not a bottomless pit of money,’ he explained. Although the uprising was wrecking Shell’s operations in Ogoniland, only 3 per cent of the company’s worldwide production was threatened. During 1993, as the disturbances increased, Watts requested the support of 1,400 armed policemen, in return for which he would provide logistics and welfare. At the company’s expense, ‘mobile police’ armed with AK-47 rifles, some of whose uniforms bore Shell’s insignia, were dispatched as an ‘oilfield protection force’ to the delta. As reports of death and destruction in Ogoni villages reached Europe and America, Shell was accused of financing ‘kill and go mobs’ to brutally suppress the uprising. Amid chaotic scenes, Shell withdrew its staff and stopped pumping oil. The Ogonis would claim that on 1 December 1993 Watts thanked the inspector general of the police for his cooperation ‘in helping to preserve the security of our operation’. His gratitude was premature.

Beyond Nigeria, Saro-Wiwa’s description of the delta’s desolation and the Nigerian government’s oppression of the Ogonis aroused fierce protests. Shell was urged to exploit its financial influence and persuade the government to cease the violence and grant the Ogonis independence. Herkströter, supported by younger directors including Mark Moody-Stuart, the British heir apparent, resisted those demands. ‘We have to work with the government,’ the directors agreed. ‘We don’t have a mandate to interfere.’ Recalling the outrage during the 1960s about American multinationals including ITT and United Fruit directly interfering in South American affairs, Shell’s directors declared, ‘We don’t get involved in politics.’ In arguments with representatives of the relief agencies, Moody-Stuart insisted, ‘Even if the government steals money, we cannot do anything about it. We are guests in the country and cannot intervene.’

In May 1994, Saro-Wiwa was arrested for inciting the murder of four chiefs and government officials who had been attacked by a crowd of Ogoni youths in a meeting hall and hacked to death. The price of Nigeria’s oil, said protestors in the electrified atmosphere, was blood. The promise by Abacha in July 1994 that the death penalty would be imposed on ‘anyone who interferes with the government’s efforts to revitalise the oil industry’ chilled Saro-Wiwa’s supporters, especially the striking oil workers.

Brian Anderson, who replaced Watts as the local Shell chairman in 1994, visited General Abacha. Like many Europeans, he had assumed that Saro-Wiwa would receive a short sentence. Nurtured by Shell’s straitjacketed culture, Anderson was immune to the nuances of the dictatorship, and his report to The Hague after his first conversation with the general did not raise any alarm. One year later, after a prejudiced trial, Saro-Wiwa was condemned to death. Only after the verdict and another visit to the general did Anderson realise his mistake. By then it was too late to influence Shell’s directors. Like a supertanker, they were impervious to shocks that required an immediate change of course. By then, Saro-Wiwa’s fate had become an international issue. Across America and Europe he was portrayed as the victim of Shell’s conduct, and the company was accused of polluting the Ogoni farmlands and of failing to protest against the rigged trial while financing the government’s destruction of the delta. President Clinton, Nelson Mandela and other international leaders protested to Abacha. The World Bank, Church leaders, Greenpeace, Amnesty International, PEN, the International Writers’ Association and even members of the Royal Geographical Society demanded that Shell abandon its operations in Nigeria. The opprobrium spread across all of Big Oil. Accused of exploitation, corruption, environmental damage and murder, Shell was urged to intercede and prevent Saro-Wiwa’s execution.

In The Hague, Cor Herkströter and his board maintained their composure. Shell men never flapped. Shell’s ‘Business Principles’, a set of guidelines committing the company to an apolitical role, had been adopted in 1976 and subsequently updated five times. According to those principles, Shell’s duty was to be decent but not evangelical. Multinationals should not interfere in sovereign states. ‘We must be part of the furniture,’ everyone agreed. ‘It’s ridiculous that we should intervene against a military dictatorship,’ said one director, to approval. ‘If we left,’ said another, ‘we would cut off Nigeria’s nose and our own. The French would replace us in a flash.’ The company’s huge investment needed to be protected, not least because after years of frustration there was still hope that the Nigerian government would agree to build a plant to liquefy and ship the country’s vast deposits of natural gas in tankers as LNG (liquefied natural gas). Shell was the master of the complicated technology necessary to freeze natural gas to minus 160°C, at which temperature it became liquid gas, which could be shipped around the world. Six hundred cubic metres of natural gas could be condensed into one cubic metre of LNG. The profits would be huge. Only a minority of British directors understood that Shell’s investment in Nigeria was becoming disproportionate to the profits. The capital, they believed, could have been better spent elsewhere. That British minority believed that standing aside from Nigeria’s political battles had been mistaken, and that Shell should have taken more interest in the delta’s environment years earlier. Yet in the midst of the storm, changing course had become too difficult. There was no alternative but to support the wrong decision. ‘I never doubted that Shell would stay the course,’ said Watts. ‘We resiled from protest,’ observed a Dutch director. ‘Shell should not be blamed for an unjust government.’ ‘Shell doesn’t get involved in politics,’ announced a spokesman. Questions were referred to the British, Dutch and American governments, which equally failed to make any forceful protest and opposed sanctions, although Nigeria exported 40 per cent of its oil to the US. At the very last moment Shell and the three governments did protest to General Abacha, but on 10 November 1995 Ken Saro-Wiwa and his eight fellow defendants were executed. Greenpeace blamed Shell’s silence for the deaths. ‘It is not for commercial organisations like Shell,’ replied a company spokesman, ‘to interfere in the legal process of a sovereign state such as Nigeria.’

Stigmatised as international pariahs, Shell’s directors realised on reflection that earlier intervention by the corporation might have stopped Saro-Wiwa’s execution. Nevertheless, amid appeals for international sanctions, Anderson and Shell’s directors met in London to decide whether to push ahead with the plan to build an LNG plant for Nigeria’s natural gas. One month later, on 15 December 1995, 30 years after suggesting the idea, Dick van den Broek of Shell signed an agreement with the Nigerian government to build a $3.8 billion LNG plant. He had threatened that failure to sign would terminate any future agreements with the company. Shell’s directors were ecstatic. Ninety per cent of the LNG output had been pre-sold, and Shell was a 25.6 per cent shareholder. Shortly after, Shell agreed to build a giant platform offshore, in an area called Bonga. These deals aggravated suspicions about Shell’s conduct during the Saro-Wiwa affair and its promise to return to the Ogoni region if its workers’ safety was guaranteed by local communities. Many critics believed that Shell’s managers in Nigeria had refused to protest against Saro-Wiwa’s execution because of collaboration with the regime. Those censuring Shell included the World Council of Churches, whose report accused the company of polluting the Ogoni area by dumping oil into waterways and of showing ‘inertia in the face of the government’s brutality’, which included intimidation, rape, arrests, torture, shooting and looting. God, said the Council, damned Shell in Nigeria. Shell denied all the charges. Exonerating itself of any responsibility because it had withdrawn from Ogoniland in 1993, Shell derided the report for regurgitating old and previously discredited allegations, 99 per cent of which, it declared, were fabrications. But the company could not win. The criticism nevertheless prompted Herkströter to admit that Shell’s culture had ‘become inward-looking, isolated and consequently some have seen us as a “state within a state”’. Mark Moody-Stuart was among the few who became openly disturbed that the company had misjudged the situation. ‘We should have been more patient,’ he admitted, ‘and less angry and offered more. There are lessons to be learned.’ ‘Nigeria,’ lamented John Jennings, a Shell director, ‘is like a house falling down. All we can do is patch it up so it leans but doesn’t collapse.’ Watts was philosophical. ‘In oil, mistakes get buried in the mists of time.’ In June 2009, Shell would pay $15.5 million in compensation to settle a lawsuit with Saro-Wiwa’s family, while admitting no wrongdoing.

Few Nigerians had attended Watts’s farewell party from Nigeria in 1994, but Shell’s directors were relieved that the company’s investments in the country were secure. General Abacha had been persuaded that without Western expertise, Nigeria’s oil production and income would diminish. Unlike Venezuela and Indonesia, Nigeria had no intention of expelling the oil majors. Both sides agreed they needed stability. In view of the continuing violence targeted against the president, Brian Anderson accepted the permanent protection of Nigerian soldiers for Shell’s employees. The corporation’s archives for 1995, Shell’s annus horribilis, were sealed. Reviving the company had become critical to its future prosperity.

Shareholders were demanding improved profits. Years of cautious under-investment, Herkströter realised, were no longer sustainable. The company had been bruised like the other oil majors by the fall of oil prices, and its poor financial performance had been undermined by choosing only ultra-safe investments and its failure, other than in the Gulf of Mexico, to find ‘elephants’. To improve value per share, Herkströter decided to stop the company befriending presidents and kings, and to focus on reform of its financial controls. Localness, previously Shell’s strength, was to be curbed. Fiefdoms were abolished. One third of the headquarters staff were made redundant, and the power of the resident chairman in each country was reduced in favour of Exxon’s method of governance through central control. The survivors were ordered to stop playing politics and start earning money. But Herkströter’s headlines did not translate into action: little happened other than a costly joint venture in America with Texaco and Saudi Aramco (the Arabian-American Oil Company) which would prove disastrous. To prevent the balance of power tilting towards the British directors, Herkströter marshalled the Dutch directors to reject Mark Moody-Stuart’s proposed purchase of British Gas (BG), a substantial oil exploration and production company, for £4 billion. Moody-Stuart was ‘very upset’, observed Phil Watts. In 2008 BG would be worth about £35 billion.

Herkströter was equally inept in his attempts to restore Shell’s reputation. ‘We are now being asked to solve political crises in developing countries,’ he said in October 1996, ‘to export Western ethics to those countries and attend to a multitude of other problems. The fact is we simply do not have the authority to carry out these tasks. And I am not sure we should have that authority.’ That opinion was opposed by Mark Moody-Stuart and Phil Watts.

Primed by his experiences with Brent Spar and Nigeria, Watts put together a list of tasks under the heading ‘Reputation Management’. For Watts, Brent Spar had been ‘a life-changing experience … We had done a technically excellent job but we had all missed the big trick. A time bomb was ticking – we missed it and we all thought we were doing our best … We never dreamt we would get that much attention.’ But if Brent Spar was Watt’s ‘big wake-up call’, he found that Nigeria ‘keeps us awake all the time’. By April 1996 he had compiled a list of initiatives, including ‘Ethics, Human Rights, Political Involvement, and the key items for the review of the Business Principles’. The ‘stewardship over Shell’s reputation’ was Watts’s priority.

Greenpeace’s campaign against the oil companies had focused on Shell’s exploration in the West Shetland islands. Ignoring the environmental lobby, Herkströter realised, was pointless. The initiative, he noted, had been seized by BP’s John Browne. Spotting the tide of opinion, Browne had, amid fanfare, delivered a speech at Stanford University urging the world to ‘begin to take precautionary action now’ to protect the environment. Shell’s directors agreed to embrace the same ideology. The corporation crafted public statements promoting its intention to be more open, to acknowledge human rights and to protect the environment by including renewable energy projects in its core business plan. In the future, said Herkströter, Shell would engage with Greenpeace to discuss the reduction of greenhouse gases in coal gasification and biofuels. Satisfied that he had fulfilled the public relations requirements, Herkströter approved the purchase of one fifth of Canada’s Athabasca tar sands for C$27 million, a relative pittance. The total estimated reserves were 1,701 billion barrels of oil. Shell anticipated extracting 179 billion barrels. Exploitation of the tar sands was uneconomic while oil was at $15 a barrel, but would be profitable once the price hit $40, although the process offended Shell’s newfound commitment to protect the environment. The tar’s extraction would require the felling of 54,000 square miles of forest, an area the size of New York state, and as a consequence wildlife would be killed and water polluted. Huge amounts of power would be required to create the steam or hot water needed to separate the bitumen from the clay, and more power and chemicals were required to separate the light petroleum from the bitumen. The whole process created three times more carbon than conventional oil operations. In The Hague, the purchase was mentioned as manifesting Shell’s ability to play both sides of the argument.

At the end of 1997, Herkströter retired. Mark Moody-Stuart, his successor, was dissatisfied with his inheritance. Appointed as ‘Mr Continuity’, Moody-Stuart, a Cambridge geologist and a Quaker who loved sailing, regarded his predecessor’s changes as timely but ineffectual. Few of the reforms had materialised. ‘Shell needs drastic remedial measures,’ he said, while fearing that the majority of Dutch directors would resist even the appointment of senior directors from outside the corporation. Shell had already missed out on two important investments. Approached by the governments of Angola and Azerbaijan to develop their oil, the company had refused requests for preliminary cash bonuses, and the opportunities were seized by BP and Exxon. Under Herkströter, Moody-Stuart lamented, Shell had even ignored the middle way. Adrift and unacclimatised to the new world, Shell had allowed its long-nurtured relationships with the governments of Oman, Nigeria and Brunei to deteriorate, and earnings were falling. In 1998 the company’s profits were $5.146 billion, compared to $8.031 billion in 1997. ‘There will be a coming crisis if we don’t change,’ warned Moody-Stuart. ‘Change is a pearl beyond price.’ The obstacles were Shell’s fragmented culture, divided management and entrenched country barons who had successfully frustrated Herkströter’s reforms. To many British employees, the Dutch engineers’ arrogance was stultifying. Convinced of their superiority, they regarded their rivals at Exxon, Chevron and especially BP with measured contempt. Yet some refused appointments in unpleasant oilfields, preferring to remain in the comfort of European and American offices, focused on investment and process rather than practical work on the ground. Convinced of the righteousness of science and engineering, the LNG department had seriously advocated building a terminal near the Bay Bridge in San Francisco.

‘I’m clearing out the cupboard,’ Moody-Stuart announced, planning instant surgery. Offices around the world were closed and country chairmen demoted, 4,000 staff were dismissed, 40 per cent of the chemicals plants sold, $4.5 billion of bad investments written off, capital spending cut by one third and, most dramatically, American Shell lost its independence. Appallingly managed and beyond financial control, US Shell represented 22 per cent of the company’s assets, yet contributed only 2.6 per cent of its earnings. Walter van de Vijver, a 42-year-old engineer, was dispatched to integrate the American company with its European owner. The cost of Moody-Stuart’s surgery was huge. Shell’s net income fell by 95 per cent, from $7.7 billion in 1997 to $350 million in 1998. There was little optimism that things would improve. The oil price in 1998, Moody-Stuart believed, was ‘likely to stay at $10’, and the likelihood of it going above $15 was ‘low’. At those prices, Shell’s profits, like BP’s and Exxon’s, were certain to fall further.

Moody-Stuart’s parallel agenda was to reform Shell’s ‘Business Principles’. A team had been working since September 1997 to develop a five-year strategy to resolve dilemmas involving human rights, global climate change and environmental problems. A larger question was whether any of these activities made sense in a ‘world of $10 oil’. Moody-Stuart was emphatic that his strategy was to generate profits ‘while contributing to the well-being of the planet and its people’. By then Watts had completed his study to alter Shell’s reputation. To boost employees’ self-esteem and to celebrate the ‘transformation process’, Moody-Stuart agreed that Watts, the new head of exploration and production, should stage a stunt. At a conference of 600 Shell executives in Maastricht in June 1998, Watts was propelled onto the stage in a spaceship, dressed in a spacesuit. ‘I have seen the future and it was great,’ he yelled to his audience, all of whom were wearing yellow T-shirts emblazoned with the slogan ‘15 per cent growth’. The onlookers were, remarked one eyewitness, ‘gobsmacked’ by Watts’s attempt to remake his ‘dour, pedantic image’. Everyone understood his agenda, however: Shell’s reserves were falling, and targets needed to be stretched. Managers were formally urged to ‘improve our effectiveness’. The message was ‘improve the score card’. At the end of his presentation, Watts urged his flock to sing Beethoven’s ‘Ode to Joy’: ‘Somewhat over the top,’ Moody-Stuart admitted. ‘We all do foolish things occasionally.’ Galvanising morale had been important. The oil majors were facing a torrid time. Those that failed, Moody-Stuart knew, would be buried alive. Executives from four American oil companies – Mobil, Amoco, Arco and Texaco – had approached Shell seeking mergers or to be bought. Shell’s split structure made that impossible. The company, Moody-Stuart knew, needed a counterplot to resist the unexpected challenge posed by BP.