AMSTERDAM, July 4 (Reuters) - Royal Dutch Shell is
not ruling out moving its headquarters from the Netherlands to
Britain, the oil company's chief executive Ben van Beurden said
in a Dutch newspaper interview published on Saturday.
Anglo-Dutch consumer products giant Unilever
said last month it plans to ditch its dual Anglo-Dutch
legal structure and create a single entity in
Britain.
Van Beurden did not explicitly say Shell wants to move its
headquarters, het Financieele Dagblad said.
"You always need to keep thinking," Shell's Van Beurden told
the newspaper. "Nothing is permanent and of course we will look
at the business climate. But moving your headquarters is not a
trivial measure. You cannot think too lightly about that."
A Shell spokesman confirmed the CEO's comments to Reuters
and said the company was looking at ways to simplify its dual
structure, as it had been doing for many years.
Shell has a complex Anglo-Dutch holding structure with a tax
residency and headquarters in the Netherlands and a registered
office in Britain.
Unilever's decision to move followed the scrapping in 2018
of a plan by Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte to do away with a
15% dividend withholding tax.
Shell’s corporate structure features the parent company
headquarters in The Hague but two share classes and other
arrangements to prevent the Dutch government from levying
withholding tax on dividends paid to shareholders of its former
British arm.
The arrangement has come under renewed scrutiny after the
Dutch government tried to scrap the dividend tax as an incentive
to convince Unilever to unify its dual structure in Rotterdam.
Rutte abandoned the plan after a popular outcry over the tax
cut, which was seen as a gift to rich foreigners.
Shell has consistently lobbied against the dividend tax,
which it says makes financing dividends, share buy-backs and
acquisitions more difficult.
(Reporting by Anthony Deutsch;
Editing by Alexander Smith)
