Javier Blas, Columnist

Shell's Tax-Free Days in the Bahamas Are Numbered

The petroleum giant makes outsized profits, unencumbered by taxes, at its Caribbean operation. That may not last much longer.

January 11, 2022 at 6:30 AM UTC

By Javier Blas

Javier Blas is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering energy and commodities. He is coauthor of “The World for Sale: Money, Power and the Traders Who Barter the Earth’s Resources.”

Paradise island beach, Nassau, Bahamas
Photographer: DANIEL SLIM/AFP

Provide news feedback or report an error

Site feedback:

Take our Survey

This article is for subscribers only.

Oil trading is a very profitable business. If you manage to pay no taxes on it and can work from a Caribbean beach, well, then it’s corporate heaven.

Royal Dutch Shell Plc, Europe’s largest energy company by market value, has managed to tick all the boxes: It has a very profitable trading subsidiary, which pays not a single cent in taxes, in Nassau, the capital of the Bahamas. The little-known entity is called Shell Western Supply and Trading Ltd., a trading outfit dealing in crude from West African and Latin American countries. It’s a cog in the huge trading operation inside Shell that many shareholders pay little attention to.