Shell's Nigerian subsidiary, Shell Petroleum Development Company of Nigeria Ltd SPDCC), said in a statement: "We are disappointed the Dutch court has determined it should assume international jurisdiction over SPDC".
Shell's local subsidiary remains the top foreign oil producer in Nigeria's oil-rich Niger Delta, a region of mangroves and swamps about the size of Portugal.
Meanwhile the SEC said HP's subsidiary in Russia had also paid more than $2m through agents and various shell companies to a Russian government official to retain a multimillion-dollar contract with the federal prosecutor's office.
But Shell, a subsidiary of the Royal Dutch/Shell Group, returned last month to its marbled office building here at One Shell Square, after making an extraordinary investment to do so.
CORPORATE images are as hard to clean up as oil spills, to judge by the experience of Royal Dutch/Shell's subsidiary in Nigeria.
Friday's ruling overturned a 2013 finding by a lower Dutch court that Shell's Dutch-based parent company could not be held liable for spills at its Nigerian subsidiary.
Shell's lawyers respond that the Nigerian justice system has been reformed and speeded up and that its Nigerian subsidiary, SPDC, should be held responsible for any pollution rather than the parent company, Shell International.
This strategy, which was the primary focus of Tuesday's hearing, involves setting up a shell subsidiary in an offshore tax haven — a k a Ireland — and transferring most of Apple's intellectual property rights to the dummy subsidiary.
There is a real scenario where both the private equity firms and the banks litigate and BCE is forced to sue the private equity shell subsidiary in Quebec and win there to get the shell subsidiary to sue against the banks and the private equity firms.
What is most revealing about Mr. Bush's much-touted antidote to the bad apples, his "financial crimes SWAT team," is how closely it mimics Enron's Cayman Island shell subsidiaries.
