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The TRUTH will set you FREE.
Saturday, March 14, 2015
Train carrying crude oil derails near Gogama, Ont.
Special relationship between a Shell oil executive and a Government Minister contributed to offshore deaths?
Special relationship between a Shell oil executive and a Government Minister contributed to offshore deaths?
Love hurts: How a special relationship between a Shell oil executive and a Government Minister contributed to offshore deaths
SELF-EXPLANATORY EMAIL FROM JOHN DONOVAN TO BARONESS HELEN LIDDELL:
From: John Donovan
Subject: THE EMAIL YOU RECEIVED FROM MR BILL CAMPBELL
Date: 9 March 2015 22:50:38 GMT
Cc: Campbell
To: liddellh@parliament.uk
Dear Baroness Liddell,
I understand you have received an email from Mr Bill Campbell, the highly esteemed retired HSE Group Auditor of Shell International.
As you are aware, it relates to your alleged contact some years ago with Mr Malcolm Brinded, when he was a Shell Managing Director whose responsibilities included Shell North Sea Platforms.
First some information about me.
For the last decade I have been operating a website focussed on Shell: royaldutchshellplc.com
As you will see if you visit, the site publishes forthright articles about Shell and also feeds news stories to the mainstream press.
See article: TV, Radio, Newspaper and Magazine Coverage, relating to the Website Royal Dutch Shell Plc .com.
An article published by The Observer provides a good example of a news story we generated about Shell. It also gives an idea of the vast traffic the site receives, which includes visits from the mainstream news media.
I have published many articles originated by Mr Campbell, many relating to the Brent Bravo affair.
I have never failed to publish any article submitted by him, but when allegations are made, I naturally wish to give named parties the opportunity to comment and correct any inaccuracies.
I now offer you that opportunity in relation to the article printed below, drafted by Mr Campbell.
If I receive no response by Friday evening of this week, I will assume that you do not take issue with any part of the content relating to you and will publish the article on news related websites, including my own.
I have already published the document entitled “The Case Against Malcolm Brinded.”
Yours sincerely
John Donovan
DRAFT ARTICLE
Love hurts
How a special relationship between a Shell oil executive and a Government Minister contributed to offshore deaths
In 1999 things had been going swimmingly for Malcolm Brinded. He as a young man had been assessed at recruitment into Shell as a potential high flyer. And by 1999 he was well on his way up the ladder, already serving as Managing Director of the oil and gas exploration and production business for the company Shell Expro in the UK. He was bound for the top of the slippery pole, marked down as a future leader of the super multi national.
But in 1999 he ran into very serious problems, his future prospects were in jeopardy.
A major internal audit requested by Shell Expro management, and which commenced in August that year in Aberdeen, found criminal neglect of maintenance offshore was on an industrial scale especially within the operations of the Brent field. The audit found that there was nothing wrong with the Shell standards, its codes of practice, its business processes, no, it was the messages from the top of Shell Expro, the business drivers, that were causing the unacceptable behavior observed both on and offshore. Much of the blame was pointed upwards, at the door of Malcolm Brinded himself.
Running parallel with the Shell internal audit at the time, were the concerns of offshore workers about the state of affairs offshore. The trade unions had raised these concerns with the Offshore Safety Division of the HSE in Aberdeen. These concerns being made public when they were aired by the media highlighting what the unions thought to was the root cause of the problem, the notorious Touch F All instruction, issued by the Brent Asset Manager to his people offshore.
Malcolm Brinded was in a bind, he could see his bright future slipping away, so he asked his close friend Helen Liddell, then the Minister for Energy, to intercede on his behalf, and use her influence to get the HSE investigation into the unions concerns halted. This is what Malcolm admitted at the time to his Chief Auditor under interview.
This intervention cleared the then Oil Director, Chris Finlayson, to issue a robust press release with a complete denial saying that the workers concerns were exaggerated, just an inappropriate use of language, and that the HSE supported this statement putting the matter to rest. The author, acting as Lead Auditor in 1999, tried several times to get Finlayson to retract his press release but he couldn’t do this he said, his boss wouldn’t let him.
Brinded also used this denial of the implications of Touch F All to survive. To dampen and cover-up the workers genuine concerns, with his bosses at the Shell international corporate headquarters in The Hague.
On the 22nd October 1999 at an Audit presentation to the assembled Shell Expro managers in Aberdeen, the author recommended that the Brent Management Team, i.e. the General Manager, his Asset Manager and Deputy, all located in Seafield House, remote from the main Shell Expro office at Tullos, be suspended pending an investigation into their conduct. This did not happen.
During the audit from August till late October they had done nothing to reduce risks to workers. They had allowed the Brent offshore installations specifically to continue in operation with no immediate remedial actions to reduce the intolerable risk levels as advised. But in 1999 Malcolm Brinded as MD couldn’t and didn’t suspend his Brent managers or shutdown the Brent installations to carry out remedial work, and he couldn’t let his own Audit run to conclusion. Any of this would have set the alarm bells ringing in corporate headquarters in The Hague, and would give the game away, so he did nothing.
As a direct consequence of this four years later two workers were killed on Brent Bravo when gas escaped from a materially defective and temporary pipe repair. In 2004 at Stonehaven Sheriff Court, Shell had pled guilty on all counts to operating the installation Brent Bravo whilst it was known to be in a dangerous condition. This all brought about by the criminal neglect of essential maintenance, over a prolonged period of time, on equipment that was critical to the safety of employees on that installation.
An internal investigation completed by May 2005, into what had happened in 1999, and specifically into Malcolm Brinded’s behaviour at that time, found that his actions to cover-up the true effects of Touch F All in 1999, had contributed in the words of Shell’s top lawyer to the deaths on Brent Bravo.
Thus it was, that a special relationship, thought not to be sexual, but a close bond, formed over a year or two when they worked together on a variety of North Sea projects, between Brinded and Helen Liddell had compromised the Government Minister whose actions in 1999 clearly contributed towards the deaths on Brent Bravo.
She must have known at the time that if the union’s concerns were as Shell stated, an over exaggeration, a misunderstanding, that condescendingly the Touch F All instruction was only written that way so as to be clearly understood offshore in a language that they would use and understand, then Malcolm Brinded would not have needed her to intervene on his behalf.
So in the secret society that is modern day Scotland, despite Alex Salmond’s reply to the author, that in all respects related to the health and safety of employees at work there should be openness and transparency, this whole affair was covered up by the Scottish authorities, to avoid the embarrassment flowing from the personal intervention of a Government Minister, who by 2003 was now in the role of Secretary of State for Scotland, and whose personal intervention had led inexorably to the deaths on Brent Bravo.
Bill Campbell
EMAIL ENDS
NO RESPONSE WAS RECEIVED
The TRUTH will set you FREE.
Price of crude oil resumes its descent
Price of crude oil resumes its descent
Article by Stanley Reed published New York Times New York Edition 14 March 2015under the headline:
Oil Prices Drop as Production Hums Along Despite a Brimming Supply
LONDON — Just as theoil market appeared to be stabilizing, the price of crude resumed its descent on Friday.
The drop, of about 4 percent, came after a report from the International Energy Agency warning that oil pouring into tank farms in the United States might “soon test storage capacity limits.”
The agency, whose reports are closely monitored by oil traders, said that overflowing storage “would inevitably lead to renewed price weakness.” American production of oil continues to increase despite recently announced cutbacks in new drilling by producers.
The price of West Texas Intermediate, the American benchmark, fell to around $45 a barrel on Friday, while Brent, the international benchmark, fell below $55 a barrel.
The Department of Energy has proposed adding five million barrels of oil to the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. The purchase, which requires congressional approval, would be added in June and July. But 9.4 million barrels of oil a day are being produced in the United States. Kevin Book, an analyst with ClearView Energy Partners, said that the proposed purchase was not an attempt to support falling prices but instead “appears to derive from a statutory obligation.”
Richard Mallinson, an analyst at Energy Aspects, a London-based research firm, said that with winter coming to an end in much of the world, the oil market was most likely due for a spell of softness. Refineries in Europe and Asia will now be undergoing routine maintenance, leading to a period of weaker demand for crude. “We are expecting another period of weakness,” Mr. Mallinson said in an interview.
Additionally, striking refinery workers in the United States reached a tentative deal this week to end their walkout. Although the walkout affected 12 refineries, it had minimal impact on production as managers and other workers kept the plants running.
While prices rose to more than $60 a barrel for Brent recently, the fundamentals in the market had not changed greatly since oil prices hit multiyear lows in the early part of this year, the agency said in its report. The supply of oil from the United States, which has increased production by more than four million barrels a day since 2009 — more than the total output of either Iraq or Iran — shows little sign of slowing down, the agency said.
At the same time, Russian exports have been rising, and Saudi Arabia, the third of the world oil production leaders, increased output slightly in January and February.
The Saudis under King Salman, who succeeded his brother Abdullah in January, are not showing any signs of readiness to abandon their policy of maintaining production and defending their share of the market regardless of the consequences for prices.
Those low prices have helped lift demand for oil to higher levels than forecasters expected in places like India, Brazil and Indonesia. Even China, whose economy is widely reported to be slowing, is still lapping up lots of crude. Overall demand, which is up more than a million barrels per day over last year, according to Energy Aspects, has trimmed expected inventory builds outside of the United States.
Stronger-than-expected global demand helps explain the wider-than-usual gap in pricing between Brent, which is used as a reference in much of the globe, and W.T.I. With operators in the United States largely barred from exporting crude, the surplus barrels have nowhere to go, and inventories have risen to near record levels.
The price snapback did not materialize out of thin air. It was aided by the frigid weather in the Northeast United States, which raised demand for heating oil, and other factors like flows into commodity investment funds.
Still, seasoned traders were taken by surprise by the roughly 30 percent rise in Brent prices to over $60 a barrel since the six-year lows in January. When oil was scraping bottom, for instance, trading companies like Trafigura Beheer booked fleets of tankers to use as storage to take advantage of the steep spread between current prices for crude and those further out. With current prices having risen sharply, the trading companies have returned most of those ships to normal duties.
But now the mood is turning. “These props to the market are now starting to buckle,” analysts at Citigroup wrote in a recent note to clients. If the United States and other global powers manage to reach a deal with Iran over its nuclear program, for instance, that could clear the way for a big surge in Iranian production.
Iraqi production, which was disrupted by weather in February, has also come back. Exports from Gulf Arab states like the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait are also running strong, analysts say, aided by aggressive discounting of their crude.
“There is so much oil out there, and it looks like it is going to build up some more,” said Michael Lynch, president of Strategic Energy and Economic Research, a market analysis firm.
The TRUTH will set you FREE.
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