Anglo-Dutch oil company Royal Dutch/Shell, whose top executives are under threat of arrest, accused the Argentine government of "discrimination" in a page-wide advert published on Friday in leading newspapers.
"The discrimination Shell is being subjected to is inadmissible," said company president Juan Aranguren in the statement, adding that the firm was unfairly blamed and fined for a diesel fuel shortage in the country.
The government of Argentine President Nestor Kirchner on July 2 announced a series of fines against Shell for violations of the rarely invoked 1974 Law of Supply that targets fuel hoarding and price-fixing.
In addition to fines, the law -- revoked in 1991 and reinstated in 1999 -- also calls for up to four years prison for law breakers.
Internal Commerce Secretary Guillermo Moreno recently took Shell to court over its alleged violations and requested that Aranguren and other top company executives be placed under arrest.
Moreno is to appear at a hearing before a judge next week to formalize the charges and name the people he wants to have arrested.
Shell, in its advert, doubted the Law of Supply's validity and complained that the government was singling them out.
"During June 2007, only Shell has been slapped with 32 fines of one million pesos each (US$312,500) by the Interior Commerce Secretariat, which is also seeking jail time for its executives," the company said.
Shell has been "arbitrarily" targeted because its sales in June this year, compared to June last year, "were far higher than the market average."
It said the shortages of diesel fuel, especially in Argentina's agricultural heartland, was temporary and was also experienced by other oil companies.
Of the roughly 800 government inspections this year, "64 percent involved Shell, whose share in the diesel fuel market is 13 percent."
This is not the first time Shell has been in Kirchner's crosshairs. In March 2005, he called for a nationwide boycott of Shell after the oil company hiked gasoline prices at the pump by as much as 4.2 percent.
IN THE AIR: While most companies said they were committed to North American operations, some added that production and costs would depend on the outcome of a US trade probe Leading local contract electronics makers Wistron Corp (緯創), Quanta Computer Inc (廣達), Inventec Corp (英業達) and Compal Electronics Inc (仁寶) are to maintain their North American expansion plans, despite Washington’s 20 percent tariff on Taiwanese goods. Wistron said it has long maintained a presence in the US, while distributing production across Taiwan, North America, Southeast Asia and Europe. The company is in talks with customers to align capacity with their site preferences, a company official told the Taipei Times by telephone on Friday. The company is still in talks with clients over who would bear the tariff costs, with the outcome pending further
NEGOTIATIONS: Semiconductors play an outsized role in Taiwan’s industrial and economic development and are a major driver of the Taiwan-US trade imbalance With US President Donald Trump threatening to impose tariffs on semiconductors, Taiwan is expected to face a significant challenge, as information and communications technology (ICT) products account for more than 70 percent of its exports to the US, Chung-Hua Institution for Economic Research (CIER, 中華經濟研究院) president Lien Hsien-ming (連賢明) said on Friday. Compared with other countries, semiconductors play a disproportionately large role in Taiwan’s industrial and economic development, Lien said. As the sixth-largest contributor to the US trade deficit, Taiwan recorded a US$73.9 billion trade surplus with the US last year — up from US$47.8 billion in 2023 — driven by strong
AI: Softbank’s stake increases in Nvidia and TSMC reflect Masayoshi Son’s effort to gain a foothold in key nodes of the AI value chain, from chip design to data infrastructure Softbank Group Corp is building up stakes in Nvidia Corp and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), the latest reflection of founder Masayoshi Son’s focus on the tools and hardware underpinning artificial intelligence (AI). The Japanese technology investor raised its stake in Nvidia to about US$3 billion by the end of March, up from US$1 billion in the prior quarter, regulatory filings showed. It bought about US$330 million worth of TSMC shares and US$170 million in Oracle Corp, they showed. Softbank’s signature Vision Fund has also monetized almost US$2 billion of public and private assets in the first half of this year,
POWELL SUCCESSOR: US Fed Governor Adriana Kugler’s resignation gives Donald Trump an opening on the board, potentially accelerating his decision on the next chair US President Donald Trump suddenly has a chance to fill an opening at the US Federal Reserve earlier than expected, after Fed Governor Adriana Kugler announced her resignation on Friday. It might also force him to pick the next Fed chair months sooner than he had anticipated. “The ball is now in Trump’s court,” LH Meyer/Monetary Policy Analytics Inc economist Derek Tang said. “Trump is the one who’s been putting pressure on the Fed to do this and that, and Trump says he wants to have his own people on. So now he has the opportunity.” Kugler’s exit unfolds amid unprecedented public pressure
RSS