Tag Archives: deal

Castle Toward meeting: stand up or hold up?

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Castle Toward Public Meeting

Over 4,500 people worldwide have joined a Facebook Save Castle Toward campaign. Continue reading →

Almost £215bn of Lloyds £260bn toxic dump on state can be tracked to HBOS

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The first of a double whammy on the Scottish taxpayer is our share of the debt burden of £260 billion of toxic ‘assets’ (as expensive mistakes are known in the upside-down world that is banking) that Lloyds have just dumped on the state for ‘insurance’.

The second hit is on pride rather than pocket. It is the traceability of around 5/6ths of this debt to HBOS – or what we still think of as the Bank of Scotland. This amounts to around£215 billion.

And in doing this neat transfer, Lloyds have arranged a valuable bonus not given to RBS in its own dump of £365 billion on the ‘state asset protection scheme’. In exchange for its generosity in this ‘asset’ insurance, Lloyds has negotiated a tax concession likely to cost the exchequer at least £7 billion in lost corporation tax.

The deal is that Lloyds ‘pays’ (and yes, this is no more a payment than the ‘assets’ are assets) the Government £15.6 billion as its insurance premium to protect the £260 billion of assets now lodged in the ‘scheme’ (now there’s an accurate word).

Lloyd’s will then be responsible for the first £25 billion of any – inevitable – losses but will be allowed to offset these losses against taxable income, a revenue loss to the exchequer of £7 billion.

Lloyds will also bear 10% of losses over £25 billion, with the state carrying the other 90%.

And the ‘paynent’ that isn’t a payment? Well, it’s payment in kind. Lloyds is giving the Government new ‘B’ shares in the bank with the right to convert these later into ordinary shares.

Quite how £15.6 billion can be translated to any particualr number of Lloyds ‘B’ shares in today’s gravity-affected market in banking shares is another matter.

‘Biggest deal in history of marine energy’ for Airtricity, prospective operator of Kintyre and Islay offshore windfarms

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Danish Wind TurbinesEdinburgh-based Aquamarine Power has just completed a deal with Airtricity to develop 1GW of wave and tidal power off the Coast of the UK and Ireland by 2020. The deal is described as ‘the biggest deal in the history of marine energy’. Airtricity has recently been announced as the prospective operator of offshore windfarm developments at Machrihanish in Kintyre and Islay, with exclusivity development agreements offered by the Crown Estate.

Airtricity, now owned by Scottish and Southern Energy (itself of recent – but no longer – acquisition interest to Vattenfall, an early operator in carbon capture) and Aquamarine will enter into a 50:50 joint venture using devices and site identification software from Aquamarine and capital – undisclosed amount – from Airtricity.

Aquamarine says that work on the first two sites has already begun but is not disclosing the locations. Their CEO, Martin McAdam says: ‘Fully consented offshore windfarm sites are selling to owner-operators at between £150k and £400k per megawatt, giving a strong indication of the large potential of this deal if all 1,000MW of sites receive full consents and grid connections.

This is another move underlining the vital need for Argyll’s subsea grid upgrade interconnector from Hunterston to Carradale, if Argyll is  not to be left behind in an area of energe development where it should be in the vanguard.

Aquamarine has designed software to identify and evaluate marie energy sites anywhere in the world suitable for its Oyster hydro-electric wave power converter and its Neptune tidal energ device. It has identified several Gigawatts of potential power in sites around the UK and Ireland but the gaining of cosents will be a sensitive process.

Its Oyster wave power converter is to start testing later this year at the cutting edge European Marine Energy Centre at Stromness in Orkney.

The photograph above – of an offshore wind farm off Copenhagen – is reproduced here under the Creative Commons licence.

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