Highlands and Islands MSP Jamie Halcro Johnston, the Scottish Conservative Shadow Minister for Business, said:
“This is an astonishing amount of public money - and the fact that the SNP have tried so hard to hide the true cost of their dealings around the Lochaber Smelter, is deeply worrying. This is all too typical of an SNP Government who are desperate to avoid scrutiny, at every level."
“The Lochaber Smelter is a vital local employer, but while this support was supposed to generate 2000 new jobs in the region, fewer than 50 new employees have so far been hired."
“This is not good enough. Local people are entitled to expect better outcomes from this level of public support. This is just the latest in a long line of problematic SNP experiments with Scottish industry, which have put jaw-dropping amounts of public money at risk.”
More on this story here: https://www.ft.com/content/4a332e59-27bc-4f6c-9b93-f201c595b38f
Extract:
The Scottish government has been forced to disclose that the value of the taxpayer guarantee it provided to metals magnate Sanjeev Gupta’s business was £586m, following a near two-year freedom of information battle with the Financial Times.
The amount was the total gross guarantee provided when Gupta’s GFG Alliance bought an aluminium smelter in Lochaber, near Fort William, and two nearby hydropower plants from Rio Tinto in 2016.
The agreement involved the Scottish government guaranteeing 25 years of power purchases by Sanjeev Gupta’s company from another business owned by his father. The now-collapsed finance company Greensill Capital was then able to transform this contract into £295m of debt, which carried the same credit rating as UK sovereign bonds, funding Gupta’s acquisition of the last remaining aluminium smelter in Britain.
