Relationship With Royal Dutch Shell
Until the mid 1980s Shell’s business in the United States was substantially independent, with its stock (“Shell Oil”) traded on the NYSE and with little direct involvement from the Group’s central office in The Hague, Netherlands. In 1984, Dutch Royal Shell made a bid to purchase those shares of Shell Oil Company it did not own (around 30%) and despite some opposition from some minority shareholders which led to a court case, Shell succeeded in the buy-out for a sum of $5.7 billion.
Despite the acquisition, however, Shell Oil remained a very independent business. This was partly for complex legal reasons as RoyalDutch/Shell feared that there could be onerous liability problems if a closer control of Shell Oil's affairs was taken by the "parent companies". One of the stranger consequences of this independence was that the Shell logo used in the US was slightly different from that used in the rest of the world. In the 1990s Shell Oil's independence began gradually to be eroded as the "parent companies" took a more hands-on approach in the running of the business. The logo used in the United States is the same as that used elsewhere since June 1, 1998.
Read more about this topic: Shell Oil Company
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