The second of a two-part article on solar farms. Part one is available HERE.
Having looked at the sheer scale of some large solar farms in and around Selby, the ownership also raises eyebrows. You would be forgiven for thinking the developers of solar farms capable of powering up to perhaps 100,000 homes or more, are traditional energy providers. They are not.
Camblesforth Solar Farm Ltd. Sounds like your local butcher, doesn’t it? Don’t be fooled, the ultimate owners are based in Guernsey, described in 2019 as “among the worst tax havens” worldwide.
This seems quite normal for large-scale arrays of 50MW and above. Certainly in Selby, applicants are usually venture capitalists, often using a convoluted web of shell and front companies with reassuringly local names.
Foreign investment is always welcome, but I wonder if we should rest easy if much of the government’s 70GW target for solar energy by 2035 is in the hands of overseas merchant bankers and treated as assets to be traded at will.
The Guernsey connection
Applications for two 50MW farms to the north and south of Camblesforth near Selby came from two companies with no employees. Both are majority owned by a third company, Camblesforth-Carlton Holdco Ltd also with no employees and £200 in assets, which in turn, is controlled by Foresight Island Gp Solar Portfolio Ltd.
A major shareholder in Foresight Island is the Irish billionaire Denis O’Brien, who prefers sunny islands to rainy Dublin. He is resident in Malta with a Bermudian correspondence address. O’Brien is chair of Digicel, a Caribbean telecoms operator.
The majority shareholder is Foresight UK Solar Development Holdco Ltd, a company owned in turn by Blackmead Infrastructure Limited, a subsidiary of Averon Park Ltd. Most of these companies have a registration address at The Shard, London.
According to the business information website Pomanda, 93.5% of Averon Park shares are owned by Foresight Fund Managers Ltd and ultimately controlled by Foresight Group Holdings Ltd incorporated in the tax haven of St Peter Port, Guernsey.
Averon Park controls over £900mn in assets and in 2021 made an operating loss of £14mn but managed to record a £95mn profit through ‘gains on investments’ without paying any UK tax. At some points in the past, it was funded by the London branch of Macquarie Bank Limited. Remember that name.
The Australian connection
The Helios 250MW application on 757 hectares of mostly BMV land to the west of Camblesforth came from Enso Green Holdings D Ltd, a joint-venture partnership between Enso Energy and Cero Generation.
Enso Energy describes itself as “one of the UK’s most experienced renewable energy developers, with an unparalleled focus on solar energy” but in 2020 the company had a turnover of £1.2mn and an average of 12 employees. Cero Generation Ltd claims to be “home to one of the largest solar development portfolios in Europe” has £32mn in shareholder funds but in 2020 appeared to have zero income and made a loss of £873,060. It has literally dozens of subsidiaries all over Europe.
In fact, Cero Generation Ltd owns Enso Energy through a holding company and another shell business – Priory Energy – it controls in Dursley, Gloucestershire. It seems to have gone into partnership with itself for reasons that are not entirely clear.
Cero Generation is majority owned (through two other companies) by UK Green Investment Bank Ltd at Morrison Street in Edinburgh which between April 2016 and August 2017 was controlled by Amber Rudd and later Greg Clarke, secretaries of state at the UK government’s business department.
UK Green Investment Bank Ltd is now owned by Moorgate PL Holdings Ltd which in 2021 made a profit of £37.5mn before tax, to which a tax rebate was generously added from the UK public purse, increasing the final profit after tax to £37,783,000. The year before it recorded a profit of £106mn including another tax rebate of £6.6mn. Good, eh?
Moorgate according to its accounts, is an “indirect subsidiary” of Macquarie Group Ltd which also owns the bank that funded Averon Park, the applicant on the two 50MW solar farms also at Camblesforth. Macquarie Group Ltd is said to be a “UK establishment of Macquarie Group Services Australia PTY Ltd” based in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia.
The Helios solar farm will it seems, be owned by an Australian asset manager through about nine different UK registered subsidiaries. I hesitate to ask why it’s necessary to have such a complex chain of ownership and assume it’s for the purposes of avoiding tax, since Moorgate paid none on almost £140mn in profits and neither did Cero Generation.
Macquarie Group Holdings (UK) No 1 Ltd incidentally, made a profit of £1.14bn in the year to March 2021 after paying tax of just £11,630 or about 0.001%. It does not appear to be a company which finds contributions to the UK Treasury all that attractive.
Macquarie by the way grew out of the Australian branch of Hill Samuel, a British merchant bank and formerly a subsidiary of Lloyds Banking Group’s offshore private banking unit.
The German connection
Boom Power based in Arundel, West Sussex was granted development permission for a 50MW solar farm at Osgodby in 2021 and submitted a request for a scoping opinion for much larger 420MW array on 1,173 hectares of agricultural land north of Howden in 2022. Although its ownership structure is more transparent it is still owned by a venture capitalist, this time in Munich, Germany. In 2021 it employed 13 people.
Jeremiah Heinrich is a founder of Picus Capital GmbH and listed as the person with significant control of Boom Power. Picus describe themselves as privately financed venture capital investors who fund “early-stage technology ventures with a focus on Real Estate, Finance & Insurance, Human Resources, Renewable Energy, Mobility, E-Commerce and Health”.
Should we care who owns solar farms?
Does the ownership of national infrastructure really matter? Perhaps not. I may be cynical but the thought occurs to me that foreign venture capitalists based abroad may not always have the best interests of the residents of Camblesforth or indeed the UK uppermost in their mind. They are not known for altruism.
The power generated will be sold at European prices, so we are unlikely to benefit financially. Any profits will be spirited tax-free overseas you can be sure. Cleaner air will come, but at a cost.
Another large 500MW £600mn solar farm, on 1,042 hectares of agricultural land near Newmarket in Cambridgeshire, is currently before planning inspectors and meeting fierce resistance. It is thought the applicant Sunnica Ltd intends to sell the project after planning approval for someone else to build and commission. This may also be the plan of other venture capitalists. The future owners and operators of large chunks of the UK’s energy infrastructure could be anyone, who knows?
It’s not as if solar farms come without problems. Batteries can combust for example, and other countries have experienced issues disposing of old solar panels. The panels themselves lose efficiency over time and are rapidly being overtaken by improved versions with higher outputs.
Who knows what the UK energy market will be like in 20 years’ time? At the moment there is a world shortage, but there may be an excess at some point.
If some future owner goes into administration who picks up the tab?
None of this matters for planning purposes but for future energy security, it may be crucial.
Part 1 of this story is here:
