Ministers helped ‘stage manage’ Shell’s relocation to UK, emails show

G overnment ministers consulted closely with Shell over its move to London to avoid embarrassment over the COP26 climate summit, new documents reveal.

The cache of emails, memos and meeting minutes, obtained via Freedom of Information requests by climate advocacy group Culture Unstained, shine a light on private communications between officials and the oil company in the months running up to the flagship conference, which was hosted by the UK in Glasgow in November 2021.

Then Prime Minister Boris Johnson hailed the climate talks as a “great success” for the UK, celebrating that the bid to limit global temperature rise to no higher than 1.5C was “still alive”. The UK government’s COP26 unit also won praise for turning down fossil fuel companies seeking to sponsor the summit. 

However, the newly obtained files seen by DeSmog reveal that despite its public shunning of polluters, the UK government was working closely with Shell behind the scenes to manage the reputational risk to both parties.

In an operation referred to under the codename “Pearl”, Cabinet Office staff outlined the government’s positive attitude towards Shell, stressing the objective to “show support for Shell’s relocation to the UK, underlying the benefits of the UK business environment,” and “understand Shell’s proposition and how we can work in partnership”.

A briefing note for Boris Johnson, prepared ahead of a meeting with Shell CEO Ben van Beurden in July 2021, suggested the prime minister should “help in avoiding perception that relocation is being driven by weaker climate standards in the UK than the Netherlands”.

Shell’s decision to relocate its headquarters to the UK from the Netherlands followed a 2021 landmark Dutch court case, which ruled the company had to reduce its emission by 45 percent by 2030. The move was not made public until 15 November 2021, two days after the Glasgow climate talks had closed.

Officials also prepared a suggested question for Johnson to ask van Beurden: “How has the recent Dutch court verdict on emissions changed your plans for Net Zero by 2050?”

Minutes from a meeting between Johnson and van Beurden from October 2021 reveal that the CEO wanted to avoid any perception that Shell is moving because of the UK’s “‘light touch’ approach to ESG [Environmental, Social and Governance]” or because the company was “trying to evade their climate responsibilities.”

The revelations are likely to be a source of embarrassment for the late Conservative government, which enacted the UK’s 2050 net zero target in 2019 under Prime Minister Theresa May – the first major economy to do so.

Shell’s profits soared to over £10 billion this year as the company doubled down on fossil fuels at the expense of low-carbon investments. The Carbon Majors project estimates that Shell alone was responsible for two percent of global greenhouse gas emissions between 1892 and 2022.

Files seen by DeSmog suggest that part of Shell’s motivation for relocating to the UK was to avoid double taxation through being tax-domiciled in both the UK and the Netherlands because “some shareholders preferred not to have their dividend remuneration subject to the Netherlands withholding tax.” 

Tessa Khan, executive director at the research and campaign group Uplift, told DeSmog: “Shell is a company that has profiteered off the backs of British bill payers, got away for years with paying as little tax as possible, and critically continues to drill for new oil and gas which is driving the changes we’re seeing to our climate.

“And yet the last government welcomed it with open arms, greenwash and all. No oil and gas company should be this cosy with government.

“With climate change imposing ever-increasing costs on the rest of us, whether that’s communities and councils cleaning up after floods, or UK farmers losing income from record rainfall, companies like Shell should be out in the cold, not in the heart of our government.”

COP26 Pressure

The documents released by the Treasury highlight how both Shell and the government were keen to ensure that the company’s relocation around the time of COP26 did not harm either party’s credibility. 

Shell contacted the Treasury in the run-up to the relocation, asking whether COP26 would overrun. According to an internal memo, “[Shell] believe it would be ‘profoundly undesirable’ to announce [relocation] during the final negotiations of Cop and so if there’s a risk of it over-running by a week or so, then they might slip the entire timetable”. 

Treasury officials then attempted to keep the COP26 Unit, the Cabinet Office entity charged with managing COP, from knowing about internal conversations to aid Shell’s relocation. 

When discussing the risk of COP26 overrunning and the potential impact of this on Shell’s announcement, the Treasury’s then-second permanent secretary Charles Roxburgh remarked: “We clearly can’t bring anyone in the COP26 unit into the picture. There are just too many people in there and it would pose a very high risk of leak.”

Roxburgh, an independent non-executive director at Shell between 2013 and 2016, worked at the Treasury for six years before rejoining Shell’s board in 2022. He met with Shell eight times in 2021, according to Treasury disclosures, and was designated as the “point person” for Shell’s communications with HMG July 2021.

“We mustn’t give any hint as to the actual ‘corporate situation’,” Roxburgh is quoted saying, “but I think we could say that ‘we are planning ahead for November and some important announcements and need to understand the timetable around the end of COP26’ – or something like that. And I’d rather do this orally if possible.”

High-level Access 

Emails obtained by Culture Unstained show that Johnson had met with Shell’s CEO at least three times in 2021. A briefing for a meeting in July mentioned that they had met in April, and an email showed they had met at the government’s Global Investment Summit in October 2021, a platform for driving investment to the country ahead of COP26. 

The investment summit was held in London’s Science Museum, which in a sponsorship deal with Shell signed a “gagging clause” in July 2021 – meaning the museum was obliged not to say anything that could harm Shell’s reputation. In the same month, the Science Museum dropped the Norwegian state oil company Equinor as a sponsor over pressure from climate campaigners. It has still not dropped its sponsorship deals with fossil fuel giants BP and Adani. 

Culture Unstained acquired the documents after a multi-year appeal process with the Information Commissioner, which ruled against the Treasury’s public interest arguments that disclosing the information would prejudice the UK and Shell’s financial interests, and the “effective conduct of public affairs.”

The emails demonstrated how Johnson and Treasury officials had sought to bolster Shell’s confidence: “the PM was ‘quite forward’ in setting out the UK position on this which their CEO found reassuring.”

The documents seen by DeSmog also contain a number of emails exchanged between Charles Roxburgh and other civil servants.

A briefing note circulated by Roxburgh in July 2021 ahead of a separate meeting between the prime minister and Ben van Beurden stated the meeting was scheduled after Dan Rosenfeld, Number 10’s chief of staff at the time, had been approached by Shell’s chairman Andrew Mackenzie.

Rosenfield was awarded a peerage in July 2023, and was a former partner at Hakluyt & Company, a corporate strategy consultancy which has been accused of spying on Greenpeace activists for Shell and BP. Hakluyt said it had “no relationship with the spooky world” and no longer spied on NGOs, according to openDemocracy’s investigation.

The briefing note instructed the prime minister to “express the UK’s strong support for Shell moving back to the UK from Holland.” Under “top lines” of talking points, Johnson was encouraged to refer back to a previous meeting that year: “as I said when we met in April, I would love to see Royal Dutch Shell back in the UK,” that he approved of Shell’s net zero targets, and would “welcome companies who share this ambition”.

Another email circulated by Roxburgh noted that Shell wanted to highlight “floating wind, carbon capture in the North East and [electric vehicle] charging” as particularly relevant to the UK.

An analysis by the NGO Common Wealth found that Shell invested five times more in oil and gas than in renewables in the third quarter of 2023. In March this year, the company weakened its 2030 decarbonisation targets, saying that it would need to invest further in oil and gas over continued demand for fossil fuels. 

Climate website Carbon Brief described this as a “bet against the world meeting its climate goals,” since it undermines the International Energy Agency’s conclusion there must be no further investment in fossil fuels in order to stay within the 1.5C temperature limit.

The Treasury, Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, and Shell did not respond to DeSmog’s request for comment.

“Ahead of COP26, it was revealed that major oil companies like Shell had been barred from sponsoring the summit due to the weakness of their climate targets and failure to align with Paris Agreement goals,” a Culture Unstained spokesperson told DeSmog.

“However, these documents make clear that, elsewhere, the government was still actively involved in trying to protect Shell’s reputation, by helping to stage-manage its relocation to the UK when the company was mired in controversy.

“If the government at the time wanted to avoid appearing ‘light touch’ on the environment, it should have backed the ruling of the Dutch court by demanding much more from Shell, rather than welcoming the company with open arms and giving a boost to its greenwash.”

Sources:

▪ This piece was first published in Desmog and re-published in PUBLIC SQUARE UK on 26 November 2024 under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence. | The author writes in a personal capacity.

▪ Cover: Flickr/Number 10. (Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.)