BrexitWatch, November 17, Robbert Lyddon
SHELL has announced that it will cease to have a joint UK-Dutch head office establishment and that the group parent will be in the UK. This has been declared as a Brexit Bonus by some, and by others as a move to get laxer treatment on fossil fuels, to evade tax, and to engage in activities questionable from a money laundering point of view.
Actually this move is all about business, and not just about the added overhead of maintaining a dual HQ, or even the comparative costs of the UK and the Netherlands. A much bigger issue is what rules and regulations would trickle down onto Shell’s global network of subsidiaries due to the location of its ultimate parent company.
This should not be confused with bypassing COP26 decisions to limit the usage of fossil fuels. That possibility is simply not on the table. Shell’s business is conducted through hundreds of locally-incorporated subsidiaries that are subject to local rules: moving the corporate HQ to the UK does not shift a refinery in Antwerp. That refinery must comply, in the future as in the past, with the respective Belgian regulations.
The idea that this has something to do with laundering money is also preposterous: the UK’s current Anti-Money Laundering regime is the EU one, based on successive EU AML Directives and supplementing Regulations. For example the UK’s Funds Transfer Regulation is a direct implementation of the EU’s one (reference number 2015/847). In any case both derive from the global standards established at the Financial Action Taskforce (FATF) level, and the respective Funds Transfer Regulations are derivative of FATF Recommendation 16.
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