The Tribune

The company behind the $650 million waste-to-energy proposal at the centre of last year’s Letter of Intent (LoI) controversy yesterday said it had been treated as “a political football”, which “turned a positive into a negative” and damaged its bid to secure financing.

Stellar Energy executives said they had never sought the document that resulted in the dismissal of Renward Wells, then-parliamentary secretary in the Ministry of Works, from the Christie government.

They had instead asked for something that could be shown to potential investors as proof that Stellar Energy and its project were for real, and being seriously considered by the Government.

Stellar Energy’s chief operating officer, J. Paul Michielsen, said: “The LOI is very simple to me. We never asked for a Letter of Intent. The only thing we had asked for at the time was, give us something that we can work with, something that we can show prospective investors, our technical team overseas, that there is a demand.

“We were given this document. Frankly, I wasn’t involved at the time. I was consulting for the business at the time, and when I saw the document the first thing I said was: ‘Where did you get this from?’ because, at the end of the day, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know that it was signed by the wrong person.”

    That ‘person’, Mr Wells, was ultimately fired from his post over his allegedly unauthorised signature on the LOI last July. During a contribution in Parliament, Mr Wells, an engineer by profession, admitted that he had signed the LOI with Stellar Energy in order to allow the company “to carry out studies”, free of charge, to present to Cabinet.

Mr Michielsen, though, reiterated: “We just asked for a document that we could show to our investors, potential investors and our technical team. The biggest misconception in this entire LOI debacle is that we had been given a contract to build a $650 million waste-to-energy plant, which is false and still today false. 

“We were given an LOI that asked us to do certain studies, end of story. At the end of it, the Government has the freedom to do whatever they want. If the right person had signed it we would not have had this entire thing blow up like that. It just became a political football.”

Mr Michielsen added: “What this has done, though, for the business, is that something that was really positive became really negative in a  very short period of time.

“Has that helped the business? No. Has that helped our efforts in securing financing? Absolutely not, it has made it more difficult but, once the whole hoopla calmed down and the political mud slinging back and forth about this entire LOI thing died down, when you look at investors, investors are smart enough to see through that one thing compared to the overall good of the project.

“What has it done to the business, I think it has put everything in a timeframe which we never expected, which means it has taken us longer,” Mr Michielsen added.

“We also knew and fully understood that within the overall energy reform, nothing could move, not even [our] studies or renewables, until the relative ministries and government decide what they wanted to do with energy reform. Over the last couple of weeks and months we have seen a clear view of what they are trying to achieve, which we as a business applaud. 

“We are not in politics; we don’t do politics as a business. We are in business to do the right thing, which is build an energy plant that makes money for the investors as well as the country, and at the same time lowers the electricity bill of everyone in the country. That’s our business. “