Shell's pause on BP takeover deal gives all sides a useful breather
T he swimming pool has gone from the basement at Shell Centre, the London headquarters of the FTSE 100 oil and gas company, as has the rifle range. The latter went about 20 years ago, while the pool was a casualty of the 2016 redevelopment of the sprawling South Bank site, which sits in the shadow of the London Eye. Some things don't change, however, and Shell staff would have heard the news this week that their employer had looked at buying BP with a shrug of the shoulders. Not that old chestnut again!
'Shell + BP = British energy behemoth' is an equation that has been chalked on many blackboards over the years, mostly those of eager investment bankers dreaming of enough fees to pay for an early retirement. Sometimes it has been more than just a dream. It came up during the oil-industry merger mania of the late 1990s, when the oil price dropped to $10 a barrel. John (now Lord) Browne raced off in a different direction, doing an astonishing string of deals including mergers with Amoco and Arco in the US and breaking into Russia with the creation of TNK-BP, a deal that two decades later still looms large in any discussions of BP's future.
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