The boss of Shell has called for Liz Truss’s government to impose a windfall tax on the energy giants to “protect the poorest” and head off social unrest.
Ms Truss has refused to impose further taxes on firms such as Shell, which have made billions from increased wholesale energy prices since Russia invaded Ukraine.
Instead, she will make taxpayers fund a cap on household energy bills.
Ben van Beurden, CEO of Shell, which made £17billion in the first half of this year, told the Energy Intelligence Forum in London: “There needs to be government intervention... intervention that somehow results in protecting the poorest.
“And that probably means governments need to tax people in this room to pay for it.”
He said energy prices and volatility in the markets threatened social instability. Mr van Beurden said: “You cannot have a market that behaves in such a way... that is going to damage a significant part of society.”
BP boss Bernard Looney, who once described the business as a “cash machine”, admitted in July that a windfall tax would not affect its investments in the North Sea.
Susannah Streeter, a market analyst at broker Hargreaves Lansdown, said: “Shell’s boss has flung open a door on a windfall tax which the UK government had been trying to close.
“This will reignite the debate over how profits of energy giants should be taxed, just as a row rages about whether welfare spending will be hit to pay for the Truss administration’s slash and spend policies.”
Georgia Whitaker, of Greenpeace UK, said: “When the boss of Shell is backing a windfall tax, it makes you wonder what it’s going to take for the government to make a withdrawal.”
