Shell completes company unification
Oil giant Shell was today tying up the loose ends of its plan to unify its board and sweep aside 100 years of history.
Shell announced that its offer for shares in the Dutch side of its business had been declared unconditional and it was waiting for the unification plan to be sanctioned by court order.
This is expected in time for trading in shares of the new company – to be called Royal Dutch Shell – to begin at 8am tomorrow on the London Stock Exchange.
Assets of the oil giant are currently split on a 60-40 basis between Royal Dutch Petroleum, with its head office in The Hague, and London-based Shell Transport.
Royal Dutch Shell will have a market value of more than £120bn (€174.3bn) at current prices to vie with major rival BP as the biggest company in the FTSE 100 Index. Shell Transport is currently the sixth biggest top-flight firm.
According to FTSE experts, it will represent around 10% of the market and the energy sector as a whole will rival the size of the banking sector.
In a statement today, the company said 91.69% of Royal Dutch shares had been tendered by the close of the acceptance period.
Chief executive Jeroen van der Veer said: “Shareholders have shown strong support throughout the process.”
The unification plan was devised in the wake of the crisis last year when it downgraded its reserves five times and was hit with fines totalling £82.7m (€120.1m) from regulators in the UK and United States.
Many investors blamed its historic structure of two sets of directors meeting separately in the UK and the Netherlands for contributing to the fiasco.
Shell, which made profits of £9.3bn (€13.5bn) last year, said unifying its twin boards would increase transparency and accountability.
