Australians pull the plug back on Britishvolt’s gigafactory
David Collard, the founder of Recharge Industries and managing director of the Scale Foundation fund, has stepped up to save Britishvolt from bankruptcy. What happens now?
Perhaps Britishvolt will really turn on. Not even a month after the receivership petition , the bankruptcy trustee would have succeeded in anything but simple (given the lack of capital ready to bet on the 3.8 billion euro gigafactory and 3,000 workers to be built in the North of the England, in Blyth, in collaboration with Pininfarina, Siemens, Aston Martin and Lotus) operation to track down a buyer for the British startup.
AUSTRALIAN SUPPORT BRITISHVOLT
To be precise, several interested parties came forward, but Recharge Industries , an Australian company owned by the New York-based Scale Facilitation Partners fund, was chosen as the best bidder in the sale procedure of the company compendium.
The Australian company has already signed a contract to acquire the assets of the company promoting the project for the construction of a plant in Blyth, in the county of Northumberland, for the production of electric batteries.
According to rumors, the real director of the rescue would be the baronet Ian Botham , former cricket champion appointed to the House of Lords by the government of Boris Johnson , a political supporter of the intervention by the Australian company.
WHAT HAPPENED TO BRITISHVOLT
That things were not going too smoothly in the parts of Britishvolt had been guessed since December 2020 when Lars Carlstrom was forced to resign following the controversy over a conviction for tax evasion which in the nineties had cost him a 10 thousand euro fine and 60 hours of social work in Sweden.
Even if the debt to justice and the taxman had been paid, it was difficult to present wary British investors with a criminal record soiled in this way. However, even without Carlstrom at the helm, that capital to build the British gigafactory never arrived.
THE MAN WHO WANTED TO LIFT SAAB
Lars-Eyvind Carlstrom , born in 1965, born in Lulea, the second largest city in Sweden by population (just over 50 thousand), on the outskirts of Lapland, once known above all for its mining activities, while today, in the era of the dematerialisation of assets , to host the first Facebook data center built outside the United States, has always had a passion for the automotive sector.
For years he tried unsuccessfully to acquire Saab, the now abandoned Trollhättan brand that lovers of the genre remember for having put the safest cars on the market in the world (the same engineers as the jets worked there), which then translated into most expensive cars in the world to manufacture, with heavy expenditure for the factory, in fact, which after various financial ups and downs, in 2016 definitively closed the hangars, sorry , the garages.
AFTER BRITISHVOLT SHAKES ITALVOLT?
And now there is fear that the contagion will also spread to Italvolt, the Mediterranean twin of Britishvolt. Even the Piedmontese gigafactory is bogged down, having suffered a few too many slowdowns that the same reality attributed to the sudden turnover at Palazzo Chigi last summer.
«In that area – the manager explained to La Stampa a few days ago – there is a big problem concerning the connection to the electricity grid of the plants. We need to make sure the site can accommodate the functionality we need, a factory like ours consumes an enormous amount of energy, we estimate up to 1% of all electricity available in Italy, so the infrastructure must be up to date. 'height. But we find ourselves in a situation in which the connection to the grid could take up to four years of work to be achieved: we do not have all this time because according to our plans, production must start in 2025. We are working to understand if it is Is it possible to speed things up and what can we do but we have not renewed the agreement with Prelios: consequently we no longer have exclusive rights on the site».
WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT THE OPERATION
Let's go back to the rescue of Britishvolt. In reality at the moment we still know quite little, with the exception of what EY, the company in charge of supervising the controlled administration procedure and the sales process, has leaked, namely that the completion of the entire operation is expected "in the next seven days ”. Speaking of Recharge Industries, the Australian company is already working at home on the construction of a gigafactory in Geelong, not far from Melbourne.
David Collard , founder and managing director of the Scale Foundation fund, said the Australian company is "excited" and "can't wait to start realizing our plans to build the UK's first gigafactory". He added: "After a competitive and rigorous process, we are confident that our proposal will produce a positive outcome for all involved."
The Australian rescues Britishvolt from the crisis by purchasing it at a final price of 300 million pounds: less than 10% of the capital required to set up the factory, having at the moment the Tory government as the only shareholder interested in building the gigafactory, which however he is limited to putting just 100 million into the pot. It remains to be seen whether the Australians will put the rest into it, perhaps drawing from Collard's finances and funds or whether they too will begin the hunt for investors. That Britishvolt's recent history seems to suggest that they are a Latino…
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/smartcity/gli-australiani-riattaccano-la-spina-alla-gigafactory-di-britishvolt/ on Tue, 07 Feb 2023 12:08:59 +0000.