The Guardian: Shell shows cracks: “Another PR blunder from the House of Shell or a tragic piece of misreporting? “Ian McCredie, head of global security services at Shell, is reported to have told a Chatham House conference a tale of how up to 70 staff have been kidnapped over the last year in Nigeria. Mr McCredie then went on to slag off the royal family in Saudi Arabia, where Shell is desperately trying to ingratiate itself, before moving on to Russia - another key market for the Anglo Dutch giant.”: Thursday 6 October 2005
Another PR blunder from the House of Shell or a tragic piece of misreporting? Following on from a Shell press officer telling a TV reporter on camera not to bother to listen to its then-UK chairman Ron Oxburgh about climate change because he will soon be gone, comes a front page belter in yesterday's FT.
Ian McCredie, head of global security services at Shell, is reported to have told a Chatham House conference a tale of how up to 70 staff have been kidnapped over the last year in Nigeria. Mr McCredie then went on to slag off the royal family in Saudi Arabia, where Shell is desperately trying to ingratiate itself, before moving on to Russia - another key market for the Anglo Dutch giant.
Shell is having to beef up its IT security because of industrial espionage in Putin-land and making its own security arrangements in other parts of the world because the locals are so ineffective.
Shell Centre's damage limitation machine was on full power yesterday, blowing out mountains of steam: "Ian McCredie was speaking at a gathering for senior security advisers and his comments were in part misquoted and quoted out of context. Like many other companies we have always exercised a risk-based approach to security and gather information from several published risk indexes (eg corruption, political, economic, etc). Ian was referring to reports by analysts, also frequently published in some media, and therefore any conclusions drawn in that debate or remarks made do not reflect Shell policy."
Thank goodness for that.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/story/0,,1585635,00.html
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