Oil & Gas Industry Task Force

Mike Bowyer Managing Director of PES International (Petroleum Engineering Services), a subsurface oil and gas production and well technology company. Their turnover in 1997-8 was £22.6 million. The Oil & Gas Industry Task Force was set up under Lord Gus Macdonald, former Chairman of the Scottish Media Group (where he was voted Corporate Leader of the Year at the Scottish Business Insider Awards in 1997). In 1998 his salary at SMG was £307,000. He also made £726,600 from share options in 1996. Although the Labour Party threatened to tighten the tax regime in the North Sea before 1997, after the election they changed their minds and in July 1999 they actually cut tax by extending Capital Gains Tax Rollover Relief to oil industry asset sales - the oil companies now pay £2 billion a year less in tax than under the Tories.

Malcolm Brinded, a former Tory policy advisor, is Chairman of Shell UK and Managing Director of Shell Expro (the UK's largest offshore operator). He has been responsible for several 'cost-reduction' (job-cutting) exercises throughout different sectors of the Shell Group since 1984. He went to Cambridge University and is a member of the Scottish Business Forum. The Royal Dutch/Shell Group is the most profitable oil company in the world, responsible for more oil and gas production than any other private company. They have had staff working on placement in the DTI since 1997. Shell were named as one of the worst polluters of UK rivers in 1992 and were fined £20,000 in 1998 for polluting the Manchester Ship Canal with 140 tonnes of oil.

Shell have de-recognised unions at their Stanlow and Haven refineries and blacklisted workers who took part in a sit-in. They consistently broke embargoes to prop up South Africa's apartheid regime through the 1980's. In 1995 they caused a worldwide scandal when they tried to dump the Brent Spar oil platform into the North Sea. Shell imported weapons and financed military operations in Ogoniland, Nigeria, in an attempt to stop protests by the Ogoni people against pollution, exploitation and repression. At least 2000 deaths have resulted from industrial and military activity in Ogoni (including the execution of protestor Ken Saro-Wiwa in 1995). Shell is also directly involved in repression and pollution of the Indian homelands of Peru, complicity with the Indonesian Government's repression of the East Timorese people and the exploitation of the U'wa people's homelands in Colombia. Sir Mark Moody-Stuart, Chairman of Shell, was appointed by Tony Blair as Co-Chair of the G8 Renewable Energy Task Force. He was paid £668,822 in 1999. In 1990 John Collins, then Chairman of Shell UK, said that the solution to global warming was to 'see this great challenge as a spur to ingenuity, the free market and...economic development. Shell makes £24.6 million a day.

Malcolm Brinded Malcolm Brinded Chairman of Shell UK. He worked on secondment to the Tory Government's Department of Energy from 1982-4. Vice President, UKOOA.

Syd Fudge Syd Fudge Former Chief Executive of Kvaerner Oil and Gas. Chair of the Offshore Contractors Association.

Francis Gugen Francis Gugen Managing Director of Amerada Hess, Vice President of the Offshore Operators Association and Chair of the CBI Environmental Affairs Committee.

Mark Hope Mark Hope Technical Director of Enterprise Oil.

James McCallum James McCallum President of Global Marine Integrated Services and Chair of Stretch Performance Network Ltd. 'Syd Fudge, former Chief executive of Kvaerner Oil and Gas, resigned in 1999 to concentrate on his role as Chair of the Offshore Contractors Association. Kvaerner is a supplier of off- and on-shore production facilities and pipelines. Their construction branch have had key staff working inside the DETR since the 1997 election. They have operations all around the world, including Brazil, the USA and Canada, Angola, the Middle east, China, Indonesia and Kazakhstan.

Francis Gugen is the Managing Director of Amerada Hess and Vice President of the Offshore Operators Association. Amerada Hess have been severely criticised by the Health and Safety Executive for safety failures on their AH001 Gas installation, including a gas leak in December 1999 which caused 3 men working in the affected area to 'run for their lives'.

Mark Hope is the Technical Director of Enterprise Oil. Enterprise Oil is the company created by the privatisation of the former British Gas UK Continental Shelf production and exploration companies in 1983. The company operates in the North Sea, Ireland, Italy and the Gulf of Mexico. They made £289.2 million profit in 1999.

James McCallum is the President of Global Marine Integrated Services, part of the huge US Global Marine Group. Global Marine is an offshore drilling contractor which owns 32 mobile drilling rigs. Global Marine Integrated Services is a 'turnkey' company, operating on a 'no-oil no-fee' basis.

Canadian John McDonald is the Managing Director of Texaco North Sea Ltd, in overall charge of all Texaco's North Sea production in the UK and Danish sectors. Texaco, the 3rd largest oil company in the US, were responsible for the 1996 Sea Empress disaster at Milford Haven in South Wales, an oil spill of 72,000 tonnes of North Sea crude oil which ruined 175 miles of coastline. They have operations in countries all over the world, including Colombia, Nigeria and Brazil. They operated in Ecuador for 20 years until 1992, during which time they have spilt more than 17 million gallons of oil, 20 billion gallons of toxic wastewater and abandoned hundreds of unlined toxic waste pits in the Amazon rainforest. The Oil & Gas Industry Task Force's first report in 1999 included an iniatiative for the industry to generate £1 billion a year from 'environmental services'. Presumably that means they can earn money from clearing up their own mess, with us to pay the bill! Texaco was listed as one of the 10 worst corporations in 1996 by Multinational Monitor. Texaco makes £6.2 million a day.

Sir Ian Wood is Managing Director of the John Wood Group Ltd, which has engineering operations in more than 25 countries. He was paid £192,000 in 1999.

John McDonald John McDonald Managing Director of Texaco North Sea Ltd, in overall charge of all Texaco's North Sea production in the UK and Danish sectors. Vice President, UKOOA.

Tom Smith Tom Smith Managing Director of Nessco Ltd and Chair of the Aberdeen branch of the Institute of Directors.

Sir Ian Wood Sir Ian Wood Managing Director of John Wood Group Ltd and JW Holdings. He is Chair of Scottish Enterprise and received the Corporate Elite 'World Player' award from Business Insider in 1996.

Alan Jones Alan Jones Former Regional President of BP Amoco Scotland. Replaced by Steve Marshall who sits on OGITF 2.

Alan Jones is the Former Regional President of BP Amoco Scotland. He was replaced by Steve Marshall (who sits on OGITF 2).BP rebranded itself in 2000 as a caring environmental company, announcing a £250 million investment in renewable energy. However, this pales into comparison with its spending on oil and gas, including £67 billion to buy Amoco and £16 billion to buy ARCO, both in 1999. BP has seen an opportunity to cash in on the CO2 emission limits set by the Kyoto Summit on Global Warming by switching its emphasis towards gas (which emits half as much CO2 in power stations as coal) and funding an expensive green PR campaign it has passed itself off as environmentally progressive (whilst continuing to expand its profits). BP Amoco makes £28.8 million a day.

Syd Fudge, Francis Gugen and James McCallum are all members of the CRINE Network Executive Committee, a cost reduction initiative founded by the oil industry in 1992. Although admitting that the North Sea oil industry had lost another 10,000 jobs by March 1999, Syd Fudge denied that this was affecting safety. At that time injuries on the Mobil Beryl platform (just one example) were running at an average of one a week. Incident Investigation sheets documented the underlying cause of some of these accidents as 'excessive stress due to impending redundancies'. At an Aberdeen Chamber of Commerce meeting in 1997 Syd Fudge defended the main North sea contractors, who were being accused of exploitation, and said that the biggest problem in the North Sea was a skill shortage. Two years later he is defending 10,000 job losses!

Shell, Texaco, BP and Amoco have all funded the Global Climate Coalition, a multi-million dollar American-based lobbying group set up to fight measures aimed at curbing global warming by discrediting scientific evidence and getting rid of 'unwanted' environmental regulations.

The Oil and Gas Industry Task Force 1 was wound up in December 1999 and a new Task Force re-named the PILOT Group was formed.