Robert Amsterdam

Bloggers Alfred and John Donovan of royaldutchshellplc.com have unearthed some pretty interesting sounding "secret minutes" from a Sept. 2001 meeting of the company's Committee of Managing Directors (CMD). The documents leaked show that in their discussions of a potential Sakhalin-China pipeline, the Shell executives expressed "considerable concern" about the role of Gazprom in the joint venture. That website says they will publish these leaked documents later today - we wonder if the Shell executives had the foresight to predict six years ago that Gazprom would end up stealing control of the project from them.