U.S. Attorney Ends Investigation of Shell

A federal prosecutor in Manhattan has decided not to prosecute the Royal Dutch/Shell Group of Cos. for overstating oil and gas reserves, officially ending a Justice Department probe of the company.

U.S. Attorney David Kelly announced Wednesday he had concluded that “a criminal prosecution of Shell would not serve the public interest at this time.”

Kelly credited the world’s third-largest publicly traded oil company with cooperating with an investigation launched last year after it disclosed it had overstated its proven oil and natural gas reserves by 4.47 billion barrels, or about 23 percent, from 1997 through 2002.
North County Times