Shell Cleared For Exploration Off Nova Scotia

Shell Cleared For Exploration Off Nova Scotia

Jun 17th, 2015 

by John Donovan. 

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By Andy Tully: Posted on Wed, 17 June 2015

Shell Canada Ltd. is ready to begin exploratory drilling off the coast of Nova Scotia now that it has received conditional approval for the project from the country’s environmental minister.

Canada’s Environmental Assessment Agency issued the decision the night of June 15 after the environmental minister, Leona Aglukkaq, found that the project in the Shelburne Basin, 125 miles south of Nova Scotia’s southwestern coast, would not have a major impact on the local environment.

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Posted in: BP, Canada, Conoco Phillips, Gulf of Mexico, Oil, Oil Prices, Royal Dutch Shell Plc.
Tagged: BP · Canada · ConocoPhillips · Oil · Royal Dutch Shell Plc · Shell

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Low oil price hits $200 billion in mega-projects

Low oil price hits $200 billion in mega-projects

Jun 17th, 2015 

by John Donovan. 

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* Ernst and Young say more project delays likely

* Say at least 24 projects worth more than $1 bln put on ice

By Ron Bousso

LONDON, June 16 (Reuters) – Deepwater oil projects and complex gas facilities worth around $200 billion have been cancelled or put on hold worldwide in recent months due to the sharp drop in oil prices over the past year, consultancy Ernst and Young said on Tuesday.

Further project cuts and delays are likely as the industry braces for an extended period of lower oil prices as a result of a supply glut.

“The mind set in the industry at the moment is that prices are unlikely to be bouncing up materially in the near term,” the consultancy’s Andy Brogan said in a presentation. “There is an expectation that volatility is with us for a reasonable period of time to come and companies need to cope with that.”

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Posted in: BG Group, Gas, Oil, Oil Prices, Reuters, Royal Dutch Shell Plc, Shell.
Tagged: BG Group · Gas · Oil · Oil Prices · Royal Dutch Shell Plc · Shell

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Shell Arctic Drill Rig Confronted at Sea by Indigenous Activists and Greenpeace Canada

Shell Arctic Drill Rig Confronted at Sea by Indigenous Activists and Greenpeace Canada

Jun 17th, 2015 

by John Donovan. 

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Press release from Greenpeace

June 17, 2015 – 4:51pm – By The Arctic Journal

Indigenous artist and activist Audrey Siegl today approached the 300-foot-tall Polar Pioneer drill rig in an inflatable boat launched from the MY Esperanza, while two Greenpeace Canada swimmers spread out in the water behind her to put their bodies in the way of the rig heading to the Arctic to drill for oil.

Siegl, dressed in the traditional regalia of the Musqueam people, stood at the front of the inflatable boat with her drum and feather out in front of her, signaling the Polar Pioneer to stop. Speaking from the action, she said:

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Posted in: Alaska, Arctic, Beaufort Sea, Canada, Chukchi Sea, Climate Change,Environment, Greenpeace, Oil Sands, Oil Spill, Pollution, Royal Dutch Shell Plc, Shell,United States.
Tagged: Alaska · Arctic Ocean · Beaufort Sea · Canada · Chukchi Sea · Royal Dutch Shell Plc · Shell

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Judge Likens Shell Oil Rig Boarding to Piracy

Judge Likens Shell Oil Rig Boarding to Piracy

Jun 17th, 2015 

by John Donovan. 

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Article by PHILIP A. JANQUART published by Courthouse News Service, Wednesday, June 17, 2015

Judge Likens Shell Oil Rig Boarding to Piracy

(CN) – A federal judge refused to dismiss Shell Offshore’s lawsuit accusing Greenpeace protestors of illegally boarding its Alaska-bound oil rig on the high seas.

The protestors, including lone U.S. citizen Aliya Field, used inflatable boats launched from the Greenpeace ship Esperanza to chase down and scale Shell’s transport vessel the Blue Marlin, and chaining themselves to the oil rig Polar Pioneer.

They boarded the ship on April 5 to protest Shell’s Arctic exploration drilling this summer in the Chukchi Sea about 75 miles northwest of Alaska.

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Posted in: Alaska, Arctic, Chukchi Sea, Environment, Greenpeace, Oil Spill, Royal Dutch Shell Plc, Shell.
Tagged: Alaska · Arctic Ocean · Chukchi Sea · Royal Dutch Shell Plc · Shell

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Shell, Japan firms may get stake in Gazprom’s Baltic LNG: Report

Shell, Japan firms may get stake in Gazprom’s Baltic LNG: Report

Jun 17th, 2015 

by John Donovan. 

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Shell, Japan firms may get stake in Gazprom’s Baltic LNG: Report

By Reuters | 17 Jun, 2015

MOSCOW:Russian gas companyGazprom may offer up to 49 percent in its Baltic LNG project to a strategic partner and the most likely candidates are Royal Dutch Shell or a consortium of Japanese firms, Russia’s Kommersant newspaper said on Wednesday.

The agreement may be signed this week during an economic forum in Russia’s second city of St Petersburg, it reported, quoting sources in the gas industry.

Gazprom was not available for immediate comment.

The gas producer plans to build a liquefied natural gas plant in theBaltic sea port of Ust-Luga with an annual capacity of 10 million tonnes. It also wants to be able to increase output to 15 million tonnes a year. An Ust-Luga port official said on Tuesday the company may need around 1 trillion roubles ($18.50 billion) to build the plant.

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Posted in: Gas, Gazprom, LNG, Reuters, Royal Dutch Shell Plc, Russia.
Tagged: Gas · Gazprom · Royal Dutch Shell Plc · Russia · Shell

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The Walmart Web: How the World’s Biggest Corporation Secretly Uses Tax Havens to Dodge Taxes

Wednesday, June 17, 2015

A groundbreaking report reveals that Walmart has built a vast, undisclosed network of 78 subsidiaries and branches in 15 overseas tax havens, which may be used to minimize foreign taxes where it has retail operations and to avoid U.S. tax on those foreign earnings. These secretive subsidiaries have never been subject to public scrutiny before. They have remained largely invisible, in part because Walmart fails to list them in its annual 10-K filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Walmart’s preferred tax haven is Luxembourg, dubbed a “magical fairyland” for corporations looking to shelter profits from taxation.
The report, The Walmart Web: How the World’s Biggest Corporation Secretly Uses Tax Havens to Dodge Taxes, is the first-ever comprehensive documentation of the company’s use of tax havens. The full report is available here, and for the report’s Key Findings, clickhere.

KEY FINDINGS

Most people know that Walmart is the world’s biggest corporation. Virtually no one knows that Walmart has an extensive and secretive web of subsidiaries located in countries widely known as tax havens. Typically, the primary purpose for a corporation to set up subsidiaries in tax havens where it has little to no business operations and few, if any, employees is to pay little, if any, taxes and to maintain financial secrecy.

Walmart has established a vast and relatively new web of subsidiaries in tax havens, while avoiding public disclosure of these subsidiaries.

All told it has 78 subsidiaries and branches in 15 offshore tax havens, none of them publicly reported before. They have remained invisible to experts on corporate tax avoidance in part because of the way Walmart has filed information about them to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Walmart may be skirting the law as there is a legal requirement to list subsidiaries that account for greater than 10 percent of assets or income.

Luxembourg, dubbed a “magical fairyland” by one tax expert because of its ability to shelter profits from taxation, has become Walmart’s tax haven of choice.

It has 22 shell companies there – 20 established since 2009 and five in 2015 alone. Walmart does not have one store there. Walmart has transferred ownership of more than $45 billion in assets to Luxembourg subsidiaries since 2011. It reported paying less than 1 percent in tax to Luxembourg on $1.3 billion in profits from 2010 through 2013.

Walmart has made tax havens central to its growing International division, which accounts for about one-third of the company’s annual profits.

At least 25 out of 27 (and perhaps all) of Walmart’s foreign operating companies (in the U.K. Brazil, Japan, China and more) are owned by subsidiaries in tax havens. All of these companies have retail stores and many employees. Walmart owns at least $76 billion in assets through shell companies domiciled in the tax havens of Luxembourg ($64.2 billion) and the Netherlands ($12.4 billion) – that’s 90 percent of the assets in Walmart’s International division ($85 billion) or 37 percent of its total assets ($205 billion).

There is evidence that Walmart uses its subsidiaries in tax havens to pursue well-known international tax-avoidance strategies:

• In 2014, Walmart’s tax-haven subsidiaries provided U.S. affiliates access to $2.4 billion in foreign earnings – in the form of low-interest, short-term loans – which may transgress U.S. law.
• Walmart generates about $1.5 billion worth of tax deductions in Luxembourg each year by making phantom interest payments to its U.S. global parent. It uses a “hybrid loan,” which makes this income disappear for tax purposes here and in Luxembourg.
• Walmart’s use of inter-company debt permits it to avoid taxes overseas. It strips earnings out of higher-tax countries by taking out inter-company loans and pays interest to itself in tax havens where the interest income is taxed lightly or not at all.

Walmart appears to be playing a long game – from tax deferral to profit windfall.

It is using tax-haven subsidiaries to minimize foreign taxes where it has retail operations and to avoid U.S. tax on those foreign earnings. Walmart apparently hopes the U.S. Congress will reward its use of tax havens by enacting legislation that would allow U.S.-based multinationals to pay little U.S. tax when repatriating current low-taxed foreign earnings (such as to fund infrastructure spending) and pay no tax with the adoption of a territorial tax system.

U.S. and foreign authorities should investigate Walmart’s tax avoidance.

Among the issues to pursue:

1. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission should ask Walmart to explain its failure to disclose on Exhibit 21 of its SEC Form 10-K any of the 78 subsidiaries and branches Walmart has in tax havens. As a remedy for that failure, the SEC should also require the company to make public a complete list of its business entities and which of those subsidiaries Walmart has elected to designate as disregarded for U.S. tax purposes, so that investors can better evaluate the company’s tax practices.
2. The Internal Revenue Service should audit Walmart’s use of subsidiaries in tax havens, including the transfer of billions of dollars to its tax-haven subsidiaries and its use of various financial instruments to move taxable income out of the United States.  The IRS should also analyze Walmart’s use of short-term offshore loans to fund some of its U.S. operations without paying repatriation taxes and its deposit of offshore cash in U.S. financial institutions to determine whether Walmart has been improperly avoiding U.S. tax.
3. The European Commission should determine whether Luxembourg has been providing Walmart with sweetheart tax deals equivalent to illegal state aid.

Download the full report here.
Download the key findings here.
Read the press release here.
Download shareable graphics here.
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UNDERTHE TPP MONSANTO WOULD BE PLAINTIFF, JUDGE AND JURY

FAST TRACK IS BACK AGAIN! STOP FAST TRACK. STOP THE TPP. A vote in the House of Representatives will occur tomorrow, Thursday, June 18, 2015. TAKE ACTION NOW! Dear FRIEND, Apparently, some politicians didn’t get the message after last week’s vote blocking Fast Track legislation from moving forward in the House.  This Thursday morning the House is expected to vote AGAIN on Fast Tracking trade deals like the environment-polluting, job-killing Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). TAKE ACTION: Please call your Representative at 888-804-8311 and urge him or her to oppose Fast Track. There’s a reason we were able to block Fast Track in the House last week: you and countless others keep telling Congress in no uncertain terms that you want “No Fast Track for the TPP!”  I have every confidence we can stop them again, but we can’t let up now. Tell Congress enough is enough! Urge them to vote NO on Fast Track at 888-804-8311888-804-8311 You know as well as I do that the stakes here are very high.  If passed, Fast Track would create a virtual rubber-stamp for dangerous trade agreements like the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) that threaten jobs, wages, the environment, public health and more in your community and communities throughout the world. Fast Track legislation really did take a major blow last week.  Winning this vote should knock Fast Track out for good.  Please call & email now. https://www.stopfasttrack.com/ Sincerely, GMO Free USA

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