Who Really Owns Saxon Windpower Ltd.?

NOWAP is often asked who really owns Saxon Windpower Ltd. From their own documentation we can see that they are a partnership between Your Energy Ltd. and Tradewind Renewables Ltd. (who are based in Wales), and that they have offices in Ipswich.

To really understand Saxon and its backers we need to concentrate on Your Energy Ltd. According to a recent presentation (8 Jan. 2004) by Bill Richmond, Chairman of Your Energy, Your Energy Ltd. was formed in 2001 by five members of TXU’s renewable energy team, and Saxon Windpower is simply a collaborative offshoot of Your Energy.

You might think, therefore, given TXU’s onetime offices in Ipswich, that Your Energy is a local firm, but the truth is more complicated. (All data which follows is drawn from documents publicly available at Companies House or on the internet.)

We quote verbatim from the Annual Report of Your Energy Ltd for 31 December 2002 [words in square brackets have been added to supply context]:

Quotation One, clause 9, page 12

Joint Venture undertaking

During the period, the company [i.e. Your Energy] acquired a 50% interest in the ordinary shares and voting rights of Saxon Windpower Ltd, whose accounting period is 31 December and which is incorporated in England, for Ł4.

Quotation Two: Clause 17, page 15.

Ultimate Controlling Party

The Directors [i.e. of Your Energy Ltd.] regard Mistral Invest Limited, a company incorporated in the Bahamas, as the immediate parent company by virtue of its 51% voting rights in the company.

The company's [i.e Your Energy’s] ultimate controlling party is CNC Investments Corporation, a company incorporated in the Bahamas, by virtue of its majority shareholding in Mistral Invest Limited.

Copies of the consolidated financial statements of CNC Investments Corporation may be obtained from c/o SAM CNC Monaco, Le Park Palace, 5 Impasse de La Fontaine, 98000 Monaco

The ultimate beneficial owner of CNC Investments Corporation, is Consolidated Navigation Corporation, a company incorporated in the Marshall Islands.

The Marshall Islands, Bikini is perhaps the best known of them, are a so-called “incorporation haven” in the South Pacific. . Visitors to http://www.register-iri.com/index.cfm will find further information on the islands and the nature of the the incorporation business carried on there. The Marshall Islands are principally attractive to shipping companies, and its registration business is similar to that in, for example, Liberia (see http://www.offshore-manual.com/taxhavens/MarshallIslands.html).

According to the same website (click here to view):

Marshall Islands corporations are easy to form and administer. If standard Articles of Incorporation are used, a company may be formed in one day.

Indeed, it is possible to register a corporation online through this site.

NOWAP will not offer comments on the moral character of this ownership trail and the places of registration, leaving readers to draw their own conclusions, and will confine itself to further factual remarks on the immediate parent company and the ultimate beneficial owner.

We will start with the immediate parent company: Mistral Invest Ltd. Mistral Invest Ltd, is an offshoot of and is advised by Platina Finance Ltd., whose London office is also Mistral Ltd.’s postal address. Platina has no web presence, that we could find, but appears to be a venture capital organisation (it belonged at one time to the Belgian Venture Association).

Mistral Invest Ltd., however, has a website: click here to view

On this site we find that it is an investment company which defines its concept as, and we quote, “Establishment of a wind-powered generation portfolio across UK and France”. More precisely, Mistral Invest Ltd. aims at “acquiring and operating a portfolio of approximately 200MW of wind farms in the UK and 150MW in France by 2007”.

Mistral Invest currently has two main investments, Your Energy Ltd. (there is a short description of Your Energy, and a web link, on the Mistral site), and a French windpower firm, SFE. Further information, including a list of staff, all of whom appear to be Platina Finance employees, may be found on the Mistral Invest web site.

So much for the immediate venture capital backers of Your Energy Ltd. What we need to know now is who are the ultimate backers of Mistral Invest Ltd? This is not easy to determine. CNC Investments Corporation is registered in the Bahamas and has an address in Monaco. They are however of central importance to Mistral, and hence to Your Energy. The Mistral site describes them in the following words:

Cornerstone shareholder

CNC Investment Corporation (CIC), the investment arm of international group CNC with its core activity in shipping, has committed 15 million Euros to launch Mistral. Beyond this, Mistral has access to over 50 million Euros of other sources of capital from CIC.

We know from Your Energy’s company report that CNC Investment Corporation are registered in the Bahamas and have an address in Monaco. From the same source we know that CIC’s owners are CNC, or Consolidated Navigation Corporation. According to the following website (click here) CNC also has an address in Monaco . We have found no other web presence.

The Mistral site remarks that Consolidated Navigation Corporation is a shipping corporation, and this is confirmed by the fact that CNC is incorporated in the Marshall Islands, which would otherwise be an odd choice for a shell company.

So, the answer to the question “Who really owns Saxon Windpower?” is that, apart from the intermediaries, your guess is as good as ours.