It is not the kind of place you would expect to find at the centre of a global energy war. John Donovan’s office is in a modest house in a suburb of Colchester. No electronic maps of Europe adorn his walls, as they do the walls of Gazprom’s Moscow control room. And nor are there any butlers bringing cups of tea and expensive biscuits, as you find at Shell’s head office on the Thames. There is just Donovan’s 89-year-old father, Alfred, in the room next door.
But it is the home of www.royaldutchshellplc.com, a website which can claim to have cost Shell billions of dollars—and helped Vladimir Putin score another victory over western energy interests. This is how.
At the end of December, the Kremlin’s politically driven campaign to win control of a liquefied natural gas project on Sakhalin island came to its predictable climax. The deal signed in Moscow between Shell and Gazprom saw the Russian company take 50 per cent plus one share of Sakhalin Energy, the consortium developing the project.
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