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SHELL’S CASUALTIES AND THE INVESTMENT FUNDS THAT PAY FOR THEM

THE WAGES OF SIN: A CHRONICLE OF SHELL’S CASUALTIES AND THE INVESTMENT FUNDS THAT PAY FOR THEM

It is a grand, old-world notion that a corporation can possess a soul, or rather, that the absence of one can be measured by its balance sheet. If that is the case, then Shell is less a corporation and more a meticulously catalogued exhibit in the museum of moral bankruptcy—the ultimate sin stock. Its history is not merely a record of drilling and profit but a chilling, chronological catalogue of calculated risks taken with other people’s lives: its employees, its customers, and the communities unfortunate enough to share a postcode with its extraction sites. read more

This website and sisters royaldutchshellgroup.com, shellnazihistory.com, royaldutchshell.website, johndonovan.website, shellnews.net, and shellwikipedia.com, are owned by John Donovan. There is also a Wikipedia segment.

Shell’s scandalous approach to safety

In the corridors of global energy, Shell presents itself as a monolithic symbol of industrial prowess, dividend reliability and transition ambition. Investors like BlackRock, Inc. and The Vanguard Group, Inc. hold sizeable stakes. Yet behind the investor-slides and glossy sustainability pledges lies a series of historical shadows: offshore disasters, legacy pollution, human-rights litigation and repeated admissions of safety underperformance. This article takes a tour through select episodes—chronologically arranged—of how Shell has, in many instances, placed lives and safety on the back burner. While satire underpins the tone, the facts are stubbornly real. read more

This website and sisters royaldutchshellgroup.com, shellnazihistory.com, royaldutchshell.website, johndonovan.website, shellnews.net, and shellwikipedia.com, are owned by John Donovan. There is also a Wikipedia segment.

From Documentary to Courtroom Showdown: When Shell plc’s Sin Stock Moment Meets the Lens of Justice

By John Donovan & AI (yes, both of us — and we’re still deciding whose turn it was to fetch the popcorn)

Opening Scene

In a world where oil-giants strut in glossy annual reports while the real cost of fossil exploitation remains buried beneath toxic sludge and courtroom delays, enters one woman: Esther Kiobel. Her life, her loss and her relentless pursuit of a corporation turn into the film Esther & the Law: The Case Against Shell. The documentary chronicles her challenge to Shell in the Netherlands — nearly thirty years after the execution of her husband — and by extension, shines a light on how Shell turned into the ultimate “sin stock”. read more

This website and sisters royaldutchshellgroup.com, shellnazihistory.com, royaldutchshell.website, johndonovan.website, shellnews.net, and shellwikipedia.com, are owned by John Donovan. There is also a Wikipedia segment.

Shell plc: Big Oil’s Legacy on Trial — When ‘Sin Stock’ Meets Niger Delta Reality”

By John Donovan & AI (yes, both of us—in equal parts outrage and editorial indulgence).

So here we are. Vast fields of oil. Devastated swamps. Communities rendered unable to drink the water, fish the rivers or live the lives they once had. And high above it all, the oil-major known as Shell walks (or sometimes limps) through a series of courtrooms—and global headlines—while investors and insiders just keep the dividend checks flowing.

In the case of the Niger-Delta, the reckoning is no longer coming—it’s already here. read more

This website and sisters royaldutchshellgroup.com, shellnazihistory.com, royaldutchshell.website, johndonovan.website, shellnews.net, and shellwikipedia.com, are owned by John Donovan. There is also a Wikipedia segment.

From Typhoons to Tort: How Shell plc Became the Ultimate Sin Stock While the Philippines Holds the Receipts

By John Donovan & AI

The Plot

In December 2021, Super Typhoon Odette (Rai) smashed into the Philippines, killing more than 400 people and leaving 1.4 million homes destroyed, among other catastrophic impacts. 

Now, a group of 67 Filipino survivors is turning their anguish into an audacious legal claim: they have delivered a “Letter Before Action” against Shell’s London-headquartered operation, seeking compensation and accountability. 

Why Shell? Because these communities argue the oil-and-gas giant helped turbo-charge climate change and thereby amplified the severity of the typhoon. As one claimant said: read more

This website and sisters royaldutchshellgroup.com, shellnazihistory.com, royaldutchshell.website, johndonovan.website, shellnews.net, and shellwikipedia.com, are owned by John Donovan. There is also a Wikipedia segment.

Shell and Apartheid: A Documentary History

Shell and Apartheid: A Documentary History of Support, Complicity, and Counter-Campaigns (1950s–1994)

By John Donovan: Published: 24 October 2025

Preface

This is not a story that begins with a single memo or ends with a press release. It is an institutional record spanning decades, continents, and boardrooms. It features a company that says it “opposed apartheid,” yet repeatedly chose the path that kept South Africa’s apartheid economy running: investing, supplying, lobbying, and—when public pressure spiked—deploying an elaborate influence operation to neutralise critics. That company is Shell. read more

This website and sisters royaldutchshellgroup.com, shellnazihistory.com, royaldutchshell.website, johndonovan.website, shellnews.net, and shellwikipedia.com, are owned by John Donovan. There is also a Wikipedia segment.

Shell’s London Escape Route: Is the Oil Giant Preparing to Jump to New York?

Here’s the latest on Shell plc’s plan to move its listing to New York — with an investigative, critical lens.

By John Donovan (with AI collaboration)

21 October 2025

When a corporate behemoth begins to flirt with another stock exchange, the romance is rarely innocent. Shell plc — once Royal Dutch Shell plc, before dropping the “Dutch” as neatly as a discarded partner — is now openly courting Wall Street.

The CEO, Wael Sawan, has been muttering about “value gaps” and “unlocking potential,” code for what London traders hear as: we’re tired of being undervalued in a city that drinks warm beer instead of crude profits. read more

This website and sisters royaldutchshellgroup.com, shellnazihistory.com, royaldutchshell.website, johndonovan.website, shellnews.net, and shellwikipedia.com, are owned by John Donovan. There is also a Wikipedia segment.

ChatGPT’s Unfiltered Assessment of Shell, the Donovans, and Decades of Dirty Laundry

Self-explanatory questions to ChatGPT (an AI writing partner) from John Donovan are in italics.

Foreword: When the Archive Answered Back

In a curious twist of modern journalism, an independent campaigner who once fought Shell in the courts found himself interviewing his AI collaborator about the company that changed both their trajectories.

For over a year, ChatGPT — an artificial intelligence language model — has assisted in researching, structuring, and documenting the extensive record of Royal Dutch Shell’s corporate conduct. When asked for its impression of the campaign, the AI responded not with sterile neutrality but with something approaching moral clarity: an acknowledgment of honesty, integrity, and persistence in the face of corporate opacity. read more

This website and sisters royaldutchshellgroup.com, shellnazihistory.com, royaldutchshell.website, johndonovan.website, shellnews.net, and shellwikipedia.com, are owned by John Donovan. There is also a Wikipedia segment.

100+ Books containing references to the Donovans, Don Marketing, or their Shell-related websites — including royaldutchshellplc.com

If you want to know how a family-run promotions outfit ended up engraving its name into the footnotes of corporate history, scan the bibliographies. Across boardrooms, courtrooms, lecture halls and environmental field notes, authors keep tripping over the same stubborn breadcrumb: the Donovans — and the websites they built to document Shell’s less-than-glorious adventures: RoyalDutchShellPLC.com, ShellNews.net, Shell2004.com, TellShell.net, and more.

Below is a guided, satirical tour of more than 100 books (plus academic chapters and handbooks) that cite the Donovans, Don Marketing, or the websites. The pattern isn’t subtle: reputational risk, crisis management, litigation, governance, Arctic escapades, Nigeria, Russia, and even the archival archaeology of Shell’s 1930s entanglements. If Shell is the “ultimate sin stock,” the citations read like a decade-spanning confession — signed by authors, sealed by publishers, and witnessed by librarians. read more

This website and sisters royaldutchshellgroup.com, shellnazihistory.com, royaldutchshell.website, johndonovan.website, shellnews.net, and shellwikipedia.com, are owned by John Donovan. There is also a Wikipedia segment.

Shell’s Friends, Foes, and Settlements: The Decades-Long Saga They Accidentally Immortalised

By John Donovan (with AI assistance)

RoyalDutchShellPLC.com Exclusive

Prologue: The Paper Trail That Became a Web Trail

On 19 September 2016, a post on RoyalDutchShellGroup.com quietly listed “links to several hundred articles by a host of different publishers … plus over 60,000 Shell-related articles” hosted across the Donovan websites.

It read like a piece of digital housekeeping.

In reality, it was the master ledger of how one multinational’s attempts at corporate control ended up immortalising the very archive it wanted to erase.

The post linked outward — to Reuters, The Guardian, The Moscow Times, and beyond — forming a living map of Shell’s missteps, litigation, and internal paranoia, all drawn together by a network of persistence that Shell accidentally helped to publicise. read more

This website and sisters royaldutchshellgroup.com, shellnazihistory.com, royaldutchshell.website, johndonovan.website, shellnews.net, and shellwikipedia.com, are owned by John Donovan. There is also a Wikipedia segment.

Shell’s Shaky Payout: NAM Finally Offers Quake Stress Cash

Emotional Damages? Yes, But Only After 7 Years of Tremors: When the Ground Shakes: Shell’s Quaking Legacy in Groningen

In a move that feels more like a confession than generosity, NAM — the Shell–ExxonMobil joint venture behind the Groningen gas field — has agreed to pay out €5,000 to €222,000 to over 5,000 residents for emotional distress and “loss of enjoyment” tied to years of gas-induced earthquakes. 

That’s on top of the yet-to-be-resolved claims for physical damages to houses (some 120,000 households), which remain in legal limbo. 

As lawyer Pieter Huitema put it:

“It’s great to achieve such a result for such a large group. We spent about two years at the negotiating table, but the result is something to be proud of.”  read more

This website and sisters royaldutchshellgroup.com, shellnazihistory.com, royaldutchshell.website, johndonovan.website, shellnews.net, and shellwikipedia.com, are owned by John Donovan. There is also a Wikipedia segment.

Shell’s Dark Fuel: The Nazi Past the Oil Giant Couldn’t Bury

Part 1: The Oil That Powered the Reich

Shell likes to describe itself as “an energy company of the future.” But history, inconveniently, refuses to stay buried. Long before Shell courted wind farms and “net-zero” slogans, it courted Adolf Hitler.

In the 1930s, as Europe spiralled toward war, Royal Dutch Shell — the genteel Anglo-Dutch oil giant whose modern logo is now synonymous with sustainability brochures — was actively supplying the economic bloodstream of Nazi Germany. Its founder and spiritual patriarch, Sir Henri Deterding, wasn’t merely an admirer of Hitler’s regime; he was a willing participant in its rise. read more

This website and sisters royaldutchshellgroup.com, shellnazihistory.com, royaldutchshell.website, johndonovan.website, shellnews.net, and shellwikipedia.com, are owned by John Donovan. There is also a Wikipedia segment.

The Quiet Architect Behind Shell’s Biggest Online Headache

How a teenage “internet whizz” helped create the website Shell tried — and failed — to silence for three decades.

A Phantom Web Whizz Became Shell’s Digital Nemesis

In the mid-1990s, when the Internet still seemed like a passing fad and oil companies still lectured the world about “responsible energy,” a quiet digital operator answered a newspaper advertisement from John Donovan, the former Shell promotions partner turned corporate adversary.

The ad sought an “Internet whizz.”

What Shell got was something far worse—a digital insurgency that would haunt its reputation for decades.

By 1998, even the Evening Standard took notice: a small website run from Colchester had become a major reputational threat to one of the world’s largest corporations. That website—eventually mirrored as RoyalDutchShellPLC.com and ShellNews.net—would become Shell’s digital nemesis, archiving leaks, lawsuits, and internal documents that chronicled the oil giant’s ethical, environmental, and legal missteps. read more

This website and sisters royaldutchshellgroup.com, shellnazihistory.com, royaldutchshell.website, johndonovan.website, shellnews.net, and shellwikipedia.com, are owned by John Donovan. There is also a Wikipedia segment.

THE MOST DAMAGING ARTICLE ABOUT SHELL EVER PUBLISHED?

“A persistent reputational risk.” — Shell internal memo, 2007

In the oil-stained annals of corporate history, few duels have burned as long — or as publicly — as that between Royal Dutch Shell and a retired British marketing man named John Donovan.

What began in the 1990s as a routine commercial dispute between Shell and Donovan’s family business, Don Marketing, would metastasize into one of the most sustained reputational headaches any multinational has ever faced.

Three decades later, Donovan’s website — RoyalDutchShellPLC.com — functions like a digital conscience for a company trying to forget its own. It is a trove of Shell’s internal embarrassments: whistleblower leaks, courtroom revelations, safety scandals, and corporate PR hypocrisy, preserved with forensic precision. read more

This website and sisters royaldutchshellgroup.com, shellnazihistory.com, royaldutchshell.website, johndonovan.website, shellnews.net, and shellwikipedia.com, are owned by John Donovan. There is also a Wikipedia segment.

Shell vs Donovan: Oil Giant vs Watchdog

How one man’s persistence exposed decades of corporate deceit — and forced an oil giant to live with its reflection.

Part 1: The Origins of a Corporate Nemesis

“There are two types of corporations: those that fear whistleblowers and those that wish they’d hired one.” — Industry proverb

In the late 1980s, John Donovan was not yet a thorn in Shell’s side. He was one of its trusted collaborators — a marketing innovator whose company, Don Marketing, created hugely successful sales promotions for Shell in the UK and around the globe.

But what began as a partnership ended in betrayal. A bitter dispute over intellectual property, allegedly stolen concepts, and corporate bullying gave birth to a feud that would last decades. read more

This website and sisters royaldutchshellgroup.com, shellnazihistory.com, royaldutchshell.website, johndonovan.website, shellnews.net, and shellwikipedia.com, are owned by John Donovan. There is also a Wikipedia segment.

Shell Dodges Justice—Again: Groningen Quakes Leave Cracks in Homes, Trust, and the Law

Another Earthquake, Another Escape Clause

In a move that shocked precisely no one familiar with the Dutch gas saga, the Dutch Public Prosecution Service (OM) announced that NAM — the joint venture between Shell and ExxonMobilwill not be prosecuted for creating “life-threatening danger” in the Groningen gas field, despite years of earthquakes, crumbling houses, and shattered nerves.

👉 Read the NL Times coverage

The OM admitted that NAM had “consciously accepted the risk” that drilling would cause earthquakes and endanger residents — but claimed that wasn’t enough to secure a criminal conviction. In plain English: Yes, they knew people could be hurt. No, that’s not a crime. Next question. read more

This website and sisters royaldutchshellgroup.com, shellnazihistory.com, royaldutchshell.website, johndonovan.website, shellnews.net, and shellwikipedia.com, are owned by John Donovan. There is also a Wikipedia segment.