- More cancel culture - 13th June 2025
- Red light for green companies - 13th June 2025
- Dead man walking - 12th June 2025
Huge concerns have been raised about public money being flung at controversial green energy companies, including some in Wales, after the Prime Minister (PM) was condemned in the media for “…putting more money into a couple of millionaires’ pockets than anyone else’s”.
Private Eye (PE) revealed that Sir Keir Starmer and BP had signed off on contentious plans for a gas-fuelled power station and carbon capture scheme on Teeside, which (along with a similar proposal for Merseyside) would be subsidised with £22 billion in public money over 25 years, but it was described in the magazine as a “monumental financial stitch up”.
This has all thrown the spotlight on what has been happening in Wales, when the Welsh Government (WG) has been keen to promote its green credentials, despite worries.
For example the WG declare online: “The Green Growth Pledge helps Welsh businesses take pro-active steps towards improving their sustainability, demonstrating their positive impact on the people and places around them, as well as joining a growing community of forward-thinking organisations who are helping Wales transition to a low carbon future”.
“It offers a range of straightforward, practical actions that can be taken, such as reducing vehicle use, increasing water and energy efficiency, and working with responsible suppliers that will help companies become more efficient, decarbonise and win new business.”
Yet the reality has been rather different. There have been, for instance plans to build a new hydrogen energy facility which were given the go-ahead despite years of public and council alarm.
Japanese firm Marubeni Europower wanted to create a hydrogen storage and refuelling unit, as well as a solar energy scheme across two sites in Bryncethin and Brynmenyn, but the scheme was halted in November following safety concerns. The WG paused the application, but then withdrew its holding direction allowing the council concerned to approve the plan.
The building of more pylons too (which may be necessary in the dash for green energy) could hit the headlines for all the wrong reasons.
One politician in Wales has warned that civil unrest could break out if a green energy company tried to access land by force for its plans to raise miles of pylons through the countryside.
Adam Price, Plaid Cymru Welsh Parliament/Senedd Cymru member for Carmarthen East and Dinefwr as well as former leader of his party, proclaimed that if the firm at the heart of the issue continued with its strategy: “We will see scenes of mass social unrest and opposition to these plans. Why threaten legal action against individuals within communities? Let’s take a step back and have some dialogue”.
Controversy has also dogged another green energy company which planned to come to Wales then pulled out, and we were threatened with legal action by a former director for mentioning it.
British Volt (BV) had monumental plans to build a plant in the Vale of Glamorgan (VoG) but to the disappointment of policy makers abandoned them, and The Eye’s story concerning what happened attracted the threats.
This is the message received by us from a founder of BV: “Your latest article is full of lies and made up bullshit. We intent (sic) to take legal actions against your publication. Lars Carlstrom“.
This menacing message came even though the piece was approved by our libel lawyers, who noted that all information was in the public domain anyway.
It is possible that the green energy moves could be flawed altogether (quite apart from using public money to back companies with a chequered past), as it seems that Electric Vehicles (EV) may not be a sound investment.
Europe’s EV sector has been struggling as consumer demand for greener vehicles fails to increase quickly enough, and industry figures have revealed that the number of cars sold in the EU fell to 643,000 in August.
Reflecting this the Swedish battery maker Northvolt (NV) announced that it was to cut 1,600 jobs, in response to what it said were ‘headwinds’. The company said it was making the redundancies across three of its sites, including 1,000 in Skellefteå, in northern Sweden.
Peter Carlsson, NV’s boss, said there are “headwinds in the automotive market, and wider industrial climate”.
Carmakers, including NV’s biggest investor, Volkswagen, have had to cope with the poor economics of EVs as demand has slowed. NV lost $1.2 billion last year, four times its loss in 2022.
All of this puts centre stage the worries about BV’s £4 billion planned project in Wales.The firm was once touted by former Prime Minister Boris Johnson as a key part of his ‘green industrial revolution’, but it came close to collapse three years ago.
In the Sunday Times (ST) it was published: “Britishvolt’s inevitable journey towards disaster has been, well, a very British story…The electric car battery factory planned for Blyth, near Newcastle (after Wales), had no customers and no products…”.
As this report alludes to, the UK Government had committed a total of £100 million worth of taxpayers’ money to BV for the venture, and it is understood officials there wanted to draw down nearly a third of the funding early, but it was refused.
Chief Strategy Officer of BV, Isobel Sheldon, said the operation was severing all ties with Mr Carlstrom. In leaving BV, Mr Carlstrom said: “I don’t wish to become a distraction”.
With this sort of background, the recent information about Northvolt as well as problems for the industry generally, came as no surprise to critics of BV, and as the website North East Bylines (NEB) had put it about Mr Carlstrom earlier: “He was the same individual whose track record had been queried by The Eye when reviewing the proposed location in Wales…”.
Before BV plumped for a site in Blyth, it had first chosen one near St Athan, but there were worrying details here too.
Neil Moore, then leader of Vale of Glamorgan council, was hugely disappointed at their failure to come, and said: “They were given a better deal elsewhere. I was surprised when they pulled out”.
BV had apparently acquired the Blyth site over the Welsh alternative because of better connections to renewable power sources such as windfarms in the North Sea, as well as an interconnector to Norway’s hydroelectric power – with timing difficulties in Wales also a factor.
But as the report in NEB showed, our research featured in publications in the North East of England after the firm had declared that it would not, after all, build the St Athan plant in the Vale of Glamorgan and move to Blyth instead.
The website said: “In July 2020 this (the plans for the Welsh battery factory) seemed a welcome bonus for Wales and the prospects of a large new green manufacturing capability with thousands of jobs could only be good news. Except, however, when doubts were quietly raised by The Eye, an investigative news and journalism website ‘looking into misdemeanours by organisations and individuals in Wales and the UK’”.
The questions about prominent figures behind BV have long been persistent, while only our journalists have published them (apart from NEB, and some other mainstream reporters, like those on the ST).
Our research could find no record of any director having a background in battery manufacturing. The South Wales scheme, though, was met with wild acclaim in some media outlets and by senior politicians.
BBC Cymru Wales (BBC CW) announced: “The firm behind a proposed battery factory which could create 4,000 jobs has listed a site in Wales as its ‘preferred option’”. The website WalesOnline (WO) published: “Plans for a giant factory and thousands of jobs for the Vale of Glamorgan have been revealed. Battery manufacturer Britishvolt announced … that two sites are in the running for their factory, with Bro Tathan business park (near St Athan) leading the way”. It stated later: “Plans for a factory producing electric car batteries that would bring thousands of jobs for the Vale of Glamorgan have moved a step closer.”.
This was The Times: “Ambitious plans have been revealed for Britain’s first gigafactory capable of producing enough fuel cells and battery packs to power 100,000 zero carbon electric cars.
“The project in south Wales, which is designed to put the UK in the race to be a global hub for the electrified vehicle industry, comes from Britishvolt, a start-up company founded by a Swedish automotive entrepreneur best known as a former associate of (a) jailed Russian businessman. Britishvolt has unveiled plans to build a gigafactory capable of producing 10 gigawatt hours (GWh) of lithium ion batteries a year from early next year at Bro Tathan, on the Cardiff airport commercial complex where Aston Martin Lagonda has opened its new carmaking factory.”
The Secretary of State for Wales at the time, Simon Hart, said it was “fantastic that we can talk about Wales as being a leading contender” for the UK’s first gigafactory.
The venture in South Wales, though, was soon stopped by BV, yet crucial facts about the men behind it could have been easily discovered.
Investigations by our journalists at Companies House (CH) and elsewhere, disclosed that a prominent director of BV was Couroush (or Courosh) Alai who until recently had lived in a modest apartment at Lily Street in Cardiff, which appeared to be a terraced house converted into flats.
Mr Carlstrom, had been involved in a coach company at Coventry that was in debt to creditors for around £1 million. He had also been director of a watch manufacturer called Thrupp and Maberly which has now been dissolved. In 2011 it had first come to light that Mr Carlstrom was the “representative in Sweden“ of a man jailed for fraud.
At an extradition hearing, the former ‘representative’ of Mr Carlstrom, said that the charges against him were part of a politically-motivated plot. His father was shot and injured in Russia in 2009 over a suspected business dispute, and he claimed that he was at risk of attack in prison if he was sent abroad to stand trial.
Meanwhile before the announcement that the new plant would be built in Northumberland as opposed to South Wales, BV’s ‘Chief Executive’ Orral Nadjari, declared: “The first UK gigaplant will… be in an alternative location (to South Wales) which we will be announcing soon”. Yet Mr Nadjari claimed he had looked at more than 100 sites for the BV factory, before alighting on the former RAF site in Bro Tathan near St Athan.
In the way the news of the ‘alternative location’ (Blyth) was welcomed, there would seem to be an uncanny echo of what happened in South Wales.
The Blyth Valley MP, Ian Levy, said at the time: “This is an incredibly exciting announcement that will have a massive impact in the constituency and the surrounding area for decades to come”.
But the ‘massive impact’ is rather different – one where the media has focused on other contentious businesses in the ‘green industrial revolution’ which have taken public money…
The memories of our Editor Phil Parry’s astonishing decades-long award-winning career in journalism when the interesting backgrounds of individuals were uncovered, as he was gripped by the rare neurological condition Hereditary Spastic Paraplegia (HSP), have been released in a major book ‘A GOOD STORY’. Order the book now!
