NETHERLANDS: Shell to pay $353m in damage

Royal Dutch Shell said yesterday it has offered to settle damage claims stemming from the company's 2004 oil reserves scandal with investors outside the United States for $352.6 million (263.8m euro) and hopes to settle with US shareholders for an additional $80m.

Shell general counsel Beat Hess said in a news conference that the offer to shareholders who bought stock from April 1999 to March 2004 was agreed to by major investors, subject to approval by the Amsterdam Court of Appeals.

In addition, Hess said the company "intends to offer the same proportional settlement to investors in the United States, provided the US court overseeing the case approves."

"For us, it is an important step in closing legal proceedings related to Shell's recategorization of reserves," he said.

Shell shares rose 1.1 per cent to $33.61 in Amsterdam trading.

Peter Paul de Vries, head of the Netherlands' VEB, which represents small shareholders and helped negotiate the settlement, praised it as "above average" in terms of return to shareholders who lost money as a result of an accounting scandal. But it's also small enough that it "doesn't harm new or current investors in Shell," he said.

Shell's shares suffered a one-day decline of more than 10 percent when the reserves problem was first made public in January 2004, and several smaller declines followed later that year as Shell was forced to adjust the size of its estimated reserves - an oil company's most precious asset - five times in all, cutting them by around a third.

The company paid $90m to settle a lawsuit brought by employee shareholders in 2005. In January 2006, investors including VEB and the massive Dutch pension fund ABP filed a class action suit against the company in the US District Court in New Jersey.




Baja