ROYAL Dutch Shell has turned its back on a century of alternating English and Dutch chairmen by choosing a Finn — Jorma Ollila, the departing chief executive of Nokia — as its non-executive chairman.

The Nokia chief, who will take up the post next June when he hands over the reins of the mobile phone maker, is moving from Finland’s greatest enterprise to the biggest company in the Netherlands.

There the similarities end. At Shell, Mr Ollila, 55 this month, will become the public face of a troubled company, one that has fallen from its pedestal and that faces major challenges in restoring its operating performance and its credibility with investors.

The stock market reacted with equanimity to the appointment; Royal Dutch stock dipped slightly after an early rise and analysts were encouraged by the choice of an “outsider” with a strong pedigree.

Some Shell watchers paid tribute to Mr Ollila’s record at Nokia of transforming a dull conglomerate into the world-beating manufacturer of an iconic consumer product. “He has done a phenomenal job at Nokia,” Bruce Evers, an analyst at Investec, said. “They took the best man for the job.”

Others pointed to the very different task that awaits him at a company that many fear has lost its way, a problem too deep-seated to be addressed by a newcomer to the oil industry. “Shell’s problem is that it lacks strategic vision. (Ollila) is a high-level, big hitter. He may understand how large organisations work but Shell’s problems are about oil production, reserves and costs,” a leading analyst commented.

More than a dozen candidates were considered for the job, which emerged out of the turmoil of last year’s reserves scandal, when Shell was forced to remove some four billion barrels from its books. Shell said that candidates were considered from the United States, Britain, the Netherlands and elsewhere in Europe. When it became clear that Shell was intent on ending its practice of reserving the top job for Dutch or British candidates, rumours briefly focused on Heinrich von Pierer, who recently retired as the chief executive of Siemens.

A Finnish passport may give Mr Ollila an initial advantage in negotiating the tortuous politics of a company riven by faction fighting and the bitterness left by the reserves scandal.

He will be based in The Hague, the official headquarters of the company after the merger, and he will be paid a salary of £500,000 for a working week of “two to three days”.

Mr Ollila’s appointment follows almost 20 months of turmoil at Shell in which the company was fined by regulators and pilloried by investors for misreporting its reserves. In response, Shell abolished a 50-year-old collegiate management structure, appointed a chief executive and merged its Dutch and British holding companies, creating a new post of non-executive chairman.

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