You must know what this is about. But in case you’ve been sleeping for a week . . . three men, with close ties to the ‘Welsh’ Labour party, were arrested last Wednesday “on suspicion of assisting a foreign intelligence service“. They were released on bail the following day.
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WHO’S INVOLVED?
The first, is David James Taylor. Originally of Ruthin, now perhaps London. But he spent most of the intervening years working as a special advisor (spad) to a number of prominent Labour politicians.
These were Rhodri Morgan, first secretary of Wales between 2000 and 2009. Peter Hain, one-time anti-Apartheid campaigner, MP for Neath, who held a few posts in the UK government, and now sits in the House of Lords. I seem to think Taylor might also have done a stint with Morgan’s successor, Carwyn Jones.
Around a decade ago Taylor got himself involved in wind energy. More on this later.
Last year he started working for Asia House. (It’s been taken down from the website.)
Next up is Steven Jones. He has already been removed from the website of the lobbying group Camlas Cymru, for which he works in Cardiff. He definitely worked for Carwyn Jones. As this report makes clear.
Also non-personed by Camlas is the third man arrested last Wednesday, Matthew Aplin.
‘Camlas’, I suggest, might be translated into English as canal or channel.
Camlas was founded, as Positif Politics Ltd, in January 2006 by Daran Hill and his wife. But Hill was sent down in July 2023 for sharing images of child abuse.
Hill links with Taylor through a company called (after a couple of name changes) Leckwith Ltd. This was started by Taylor in November 2011 and taken over by Hill on New Year’s Day 2018. Leckwith was Dissolved just over a year after the exchange.
Was Hill killing off a possible competitor? If so, how much did he pay Taylor?
Whatever, Taylor then became a client of Hill. As I found out in a DM exchange back in August 2020. (Full version here.)
The other individual named in media reports, but not arrested, was Taylor’s wife Joani Reid, Labour MP for East Kilbride and Strathaven. The grand-daughter of Jimmy Reid. (Despite his politics, I always had time for him.)
They might have met when Reid was a councillor in Islington from 2014 to 2022.
Reid claimed no knowledge of her husband’s business activities. But why would she link the arrest to his business dealings? He was arrested on suspicion of spying.
Following Taylor’s arrest, Reid said in a statement that she is “not part of” her husband’s business activities.
So what have we got? A young MP, only elected in 2024, on the right of the Labour party, and certainly not privy to state secrets.
Of the three men, none is a nuclear scientist, or a high-ranking military officer, so I think we can rule out slipping the Chinese Communist Party important information.
Which leaves me to conclude that what they’re suspected of is commercial in nature. Unless of course, the CCP is planning to take over the ‘Welsh’ Labour party. But if the comrades in Beijing rummage in the drawers, and check down the backs of the sofas, they might find a receipt for that shower.
Whatever they paid – they wuz robbed!
Let’s proceed on the assumption that any offence committed is of a commercial or financial nature.
UPDATE: 01.04.2026: This incredible story just took another crazy turn with the suggestion that Joani Reid had ‘relationships’ with two captains of nuclear submarines. Read it for yourself.
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MORE ON DAVID JAMES TAYLOR, INTRODUCING BUTE ENERGY
For perhaps ten years David James Taylor has been involved with renewable energy. More specifically wind power. His involvement is due to developers realising how useful he is through his contacts in the Labour party that’s run the Welsh parliament for 27 years, either alone or with a junior partner in the Lib Dems or Plaid Cymru.
All this is covered in the many, many pieces I’ve put out on Bute Energy.
A good place to start might be Hendy Wind Farm, not far from Llandrindod. Where nary a turbine has turned. The eponymous company was launched in May 2011 by Matthew Simon Weiner, Graham Prothero, Michael Henry Marx, and Charles Julian Barwick.
There were linked projects at Bryn Blaen, near Llangurig, and Rhoscrowther on Milford Haven waterway.
Behind it was an outfit called U+I, taken over late in 2021 by Landsec.
The original directors were joined in August by Steven John Radford who, in May 2011, had launched Njord Energy Ltd. This company is in the process of being wound up. A new Radford company launched last year is Njord Wind.
Planning permission for Hendy was refused by the local council in April 2017, and this decision was upheld by an inspector in May 2018. At the council meeting a lobbyist tried to hand a note to the councillors and she had to be ushered away.
The woman was Anna McMorrin, working for Invicta Public Affairs of Newcastle. A Labour stalwart, she became MP for Cardiff North in the general election of June 2017.
As I say, permission for this windfarm was refused; but then came a strange incident that defied – and still defies – explanation. In October 2018, Lesley Griffiths, the Energy, Planning and Rural Affairs Secretary for the self-styled ‘Welsh Government’ said she would ignore the planning inspector’s decision and allow Hendy Wind Farm to go ahead.
By this time David JamesTaylor had developed an interest in wind turbines (which may link with his failure to be elected North Wales PCC in May 2016). Taylor’s an ally and friend of Griffiths. Here he is campaigning for her.
A month before Griffiths’ bizarre decision a company was launched called Windward Generation Ltd. Later re-named Bute Energy Ltd, then RSCO 3750 Ltd, and Dissolved in September 2023.
The original directors, from Scotland, were Oliver James Millican and Lawson Douglas Steele. They were joined six days later by Radford.
Bute Energy has since spawned many companies planning windfarms, solar arrays, Battery Energy Storage Systems (BESS), and pylon runs from central Wales; one to just south of Carmarthen where it’ll meet the main grid from Pembroke running through the south and on to England, the other running north east and over the border near Oswestry.
The ultimate holding company for them all is Windward Global Ltd, formed 16 May 2017. The only shareholder is Oliver James Millican. He’s the son of Peter Millican of real estate company Parabola. Millican, Steele, and the other member of the Bute troika, Stuart Allan George, had all worked for Parabola, and all ‘left’ at the same time.
Taylor was soon involved. Becoming a partner in Grayling Capital LLP. And holding shares in Windward Energy Ltd, both in his own name and that of his company Moblake Associates Ltd. These shares seem to have been sold in July 2022.
But why was Taylor given these shares in the first place? Why was he a partner in the LLP? What was he doing for Bute?
I’ll conclude this section on Taylor by saying that in the Moblake Ltd accounts for year ending 30 April 2021 we find this entry.
There’s no explanation of where the money came from that he gave himself as a ‘loan’. Even though it’s before the sale of the Windward Energy shares I still assumed this money came from Bute, for services rendered.
Moblake soon went into liquidation.
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POSITIF, CAMLAS, BUTE
In the first section I mentioned David Taylor’s link to child pornography fan Daran Hill, and Hill’s company Positif. Since renamed Camlas. And we saw that the other two men arrested with Taylor are Camlas employees.
Camlas is owned by Rhodri ab Owen. Rhodri’s brother is Senedd Member Rhys ab Owen, who sits as an Independent following a minor lapse that saw the pearl-clutchers of Plaid Cymru distance themselves.
These brothers are the sons of lifelong Plaid activist and Assembly Member the late Owen John Thomas, with whom I had a few jars back in The Good Old Days when the party prioritised Wales and Welsh interests before going far left then Woke.
Camlas seems to be another Plaid-Labour hybrid. (Like Deryn.) For as we’ve seen, and despite Plaid ownership, there’s plenty of Labour involvement. Another from that quarter worth mentioning is Naomi Williams, the partner of Labour SM Jack Sargeant, who did 14 years with Positif-Camlas and ended up as Managing Partner.
Another Camlas-Labour connection is provided by Matthew Hexter. He worked for Camlas for over three years, as a Senior Political Consultant, before becoming a Special Adviser at the Wales Office.
Bute Energy is a client of Camlas. And as I’ve established above, Taylor has a lengthy association with Bute. But Taylor’s now moved on, and since September last year he’s been Head of Programmes for Asia House in London.
I don’t know much about Asia House, but it has many contacts in China. That’s almost inevitable, with China being the largest Asian country. And there needn’t be anything suspicious about it. Except that China is a country controlled by a Communist regime with its hand in everything.
Taylor’s most recent company is Earthcott Ltd. Launched 1 September 2021. The latest accounts, to year ending 30 September 2024, show a big increase in assets and cash. And, as we saw earlier with Moblake, there’s no explanation for where it comes from.
Is this to be paid to himself as a loan that doesn’t need to be repaid?
Idly flicking through the Asia House accounts filed with Companies House, I soon came upon the capture you see below, which rang a bell. But why?
Rathbones is a major investment company, with its roots in Liverpool. Like most asset and investment companies nowadays it’s keen to make money from ‘renewable’ energy. But let me explain why I found Rathbone’s involvement interesting.
The Rathbone family still benefits handsomely from such investments. One member of the family sits in the Senedd, Jenny Rathbone, SM for Cardiff Central since 2011. As Wikipedia tells us:
Rathbone descended from the Rathbone family, with many members being notable merchants and politicians. Rathbone’s great aunt is Eleanor Rathbone, one of the first women elected as a Member of Parliament.[16][17][18] Her great grandfather was William Rathbone V, who was Lord Mayor of Liverpool.[19]
Jenny Rathbone is a big supporter of ‘Renewables’. And “sits on the Climate Change, Environment and Rural Affairs Committee“. But it don’t end there.
Her husband, or partner, John Uden, who knows bugger all about wind energy, had a sinecure created for him by Bute Energy on its ‘Welsh Advisory Board’ a few years back. Another member recruited was redundant Labour MEP Derek Vaughan.
In fact, Bute has been hoovering up people with influence in the Labour party for some years. A recent addition is Sophie Howe, former Future Generations Commissioner, who’s now a director of Bute Energy Ltd.
And it seems to have started with David James Taylor, because the boys from Edinburgh didn’t know anybody here until they recruited him.
But now, with the wind in their sails, Plaid Cymru seem to be the target. One notable recruit being 29-year-old Baroness Carmen Smith. She was selected for the Lords by the party hierarchy over the members’ choice of former MP Elfyn Llwyd.
Did Bute have a hand in that? Because Smith works for Bute.
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UPDATES
Martin ‘Shippo’ Shipton, of ‘Welsh Government’-funded Nation.Cymru, had his door kicked in just after 6am last Wednesday by an “eight-strong team from the counter-terrorism division of the Metropolitan Police“. As he reports here.
To believe him this was all a misunderstanding due to a completely innocent visit he made to Hong Kong, with David James Taylor, to meet representatives of the Chinese Communist Party.
Fair enough, squire . . . except that Shippo has made his admiration for Communist China clear on a few occasions.
He sounds like a visitor to Stalin’s Russia in awe of the grain harvest.
And on Friday the Western Mail gave him a big spread. Though I was initially confused by the reference to “top Welsh journalist“.
Shipton is a biased lefty propagandist subsidised with our money. If it was up to me I’d have him ‘cuffed, dragged off to some quiet place, where he’d be encouraged to respond to the gentle persuasion of a rubber hose.
But, then, I’m a far-right bastard . . . who respects democracy, who wants to defend freedom of speech, who rejects censorship and Digital ID, who realises that Net Zero is a Globalist scam, who knows that Covid was engineered by some truly evil bastards.
Just another nobody who loves his country, and realises who its real enemies are.
And I’ve got a sense of humour!
In other news, Taylor’s wife, Joani Reid, has resigned the Labour whip.
Another property has been searched. So who is it? Well, he’s a former aide to Tom Watson, former deputy leader of the Labour party, who now sits in the House of Lords.
Watson became a director of Bute company Windward Energy Ltd in September 2024.
I could go about Labour party connections with Bute. For example, funding is said to be coming from Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners, where we find a former Danish PM, who happens to be the wife of Stephen Kinnock, Labour MP for Aberavon.
With more investment coming from the Welsh local government pension pot.
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CONCLUSION
Welsh politics is corrupt. It’s a cess-pit. There could be no other way after a century of Labour party dominance and the cronyism and nepotism that goes with it.
With devolution third-rate politicos have been bossed around by spads and advisers, civil servants answering to bosses in London, and bullied by lobbysists and others. All of whom have more influence in Corruption Bay than we, the people they were elected to represent.
Which explains so much. Such as why Wales is the only country in the Western world without a register of lobbyists. Because the lobbyists didn’t want it!
In recent years, new players have added to that corruption.
Among these new players, Bute Energy is prominent. It wants to plaster rural Wales in 250-metre-tall wind turbines, cover good land with solar panels, and destroy what remains with pylons.
And Bute’s done this through buying political influence. The boys from Auld Reekie know how the game is played. And it was so easy when you’re dealing with thick-as-shit politicians, with no business sense – but stupid and gullible enough to believe that human beings are destroying the planet!
And for what? Unreliable and expensive ‘renewable’ energy. While China builds one coal-fired power station after another. While supplying us with components for wind turbines and complete solar panels.
And there is already Chinese interest in ‘renewables’ in Wales. Brenig wind farm, in the Clocaenog forest, is owned by the China General Nuclear Power Corporation of Guandong Province.
Wales & West Utilities is Chinese owned. After trawling through a labyrinth of ownership you eventually come to West Gas Networks Ltd. Check out the shareholders. Tracing back to Li Ka-shing.
It would relatively easy for China to begin a takeover of the UK energy market in Wales. There’d be little or no oversight from incompetent politicians who’d dress it all up as ‘diversity’ or ‘foreign investment’, or some such nonsense.
With the mainstream media, aided by the likes of Martin ‘China’ Shipton and Wee Willy Hayward, denouncing critics as racists and Sinophobes.
I don’t want it to look like I’m picking on Bute Energy, but it’s certainly a link between those who were pulled in. Bute, and of course the ‘Welsh’ Labour party that Bute’s so successfully infiltrated.
On top of which, people are telling me that Bute, perhaps due to mounting local opposition to its plans, is looking to sell up.
I’ll say no more. Form your own conclusions from the evidence I’ve presented.
♦ end ♦
© Royston Jones 2026
Hi jac. Have you an email address
editor@jacothenorth.net
Corruption Bay
A Poetic Reflection on Welsh Politics
Welsh politics, a tarnished name,
A century under Labour’s reign.
Cronyism and nepotism thrive,
In shadows where secrets stay alive.
Devolution brought a new parade,
Of spads and advisers, lobbyists paid.
Civil servants from London call,
Their influence greater than ours, after all.
Why no register of lobbyists here?
Because they whisper, their motives clear.
Wales, unique in the Western sphere—
Corruption’s grip, year after year.
Fresh players now join the fray,
Bute Energy, carving its own way.
Wind turbines towering, solar arrays,
Rural Wales changed in irreversible ways.
Political influence bought and sold,
Auld Reekie’s boys, cunning and bold.
Gullible leaders, business sense slight,
Believing the world must share their fight.
And all for unreliable, costly power,
While China’s coal rises, hour by hour.
Supplying turbines, solar panels too,
Their interests now shaping what we do.
Brenig wind farm, Clocaenog trees—
Owned by China’s nuclear expertise.
Wales & West Utilities, tracing the line,
A labyrinth leading to Li Ka-Shing’s sign.
A takeover looms, not far away,
Oversight missing, lost in the fray.
Politicians touting ‘diversity’ pride,
Foreign investment, their folly to hide.
Critics branded racists, with media’s aid,
Their questions silenced, their concerns dissuade.
Bute and Labour, the ties entwined,
Infiltration subtle, intentions aligned.
Rumours whisper of Bute’s retreat,
Local resistance, mounting heat.
So, take this evidence, judge the show—
Form your conclusions, let truth bestow.
Could not resist it!!!
That’s brilliant! Can I put it out on X?
Of course and thanks for another great article
I suspect the pre Parabola days of George might have some answers
He graduated with a first in economics and finance from Glasgow, then spent four years with PwC. Almost certainly on the accountancy training programme which turns graduates into one of the various types of accountant (management, audit etc)
30 years ago when I was on ca £45 k at PwC the new graduates were on £28k including four weeks study leave and all training and exams paid for. We used them as “spreadsheet wallahs”, but they were bright kids and the pick of that years graduate pool
He will have spent four years working at some of Scotlands biggest plc’s, like SSE for example, but once trained went to work for his dad. He will have made many useful contacts from a similar generation of “bright young things”
Quite separately, and in no way connected, when Eluned Morgan felt the need for a little experience in the real world, she spent a relatively short time working for SSE in Wales
Do you mean Oliver Millican?
I do. I still haven’t committed to memory who is who there
I know them all. I have their inside leg measurements!
Who did they share flats with at uni and who was on the same intake at PwC?
Working on it.
Interesting that South Wales Police were shut out of this?!
Met police only?
One wonders why, usually the local patch police get involved.
It was a specialist counter-terrorism unit. But it did have local help.
Shipton probably a grass on the inside – investigative journalism reinvented in Pontcanna, Splott or Grangetown!
It looks like you are exposing the antics of a bunch of opportunistic wide boys always on the make, taking any old chance to make a buck often at the expense of the public purse. Teaming up with carpetbaggers riding the net zero gravy train and moving on to “doing work” with the Chinese Communist Party whose intentions are always so so noble. I guess that’s not so different to blowing smoke on behalf of the UK Labour Party and its Welsh branch operation. Keep digging as I suspect there’s another busload of greedy creeps to be revealed.
Wales is an open door for ‘opportunists’.
Interesting about James Robinson being arrested. He’s married to Gloria De Piero, once Labour MP, now back in media. She’s been quite close to Lisa Nandy and Jo Platt – Wigan and Leigh & Atherton MP’S respectively in my patch – in the past. And I’m sure I’ve seen Lisa Nandy mentioned, in another piece I’ve read, as connected to this through receiving a donation from someone involved in the case. But I can’t remember where…maybe you Jac?…..but wouldn’t be at all surprised to see similar corruption embedded in Labour up here too.
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I’d never heard of James Robinson until yesterday. And I don’t recall ever writing about Lisa Nandy. Sorry, Alison.
You are the only one I know who joins all the dots on corruption in Wales! This article is brilliant and hope the police investigating are reading this! You deserve a medal! There’s nothing worse than being betrayed by ‘your own’! You opened my eyes years ago with your job on Penny Mordaunt! For a moment she could have been PM! Thank you!
Thank you, Sue.
Jac OBE, for services to spivbusting. But would you accept one? 😉
No.
Not just Welsh Labour. Dan has confirmed one of the three had been a member of Reform UK. Lobbyist are gonna lobby, it’s what they do.
China General Nuclear do not own Brenig as CGN was dissolved in 2021 after they were not allowed to own a share of Sizewell anymore
Bute are well connected with Labour, not just Welsh Labour, as Michael Shanks was seen advertising them in Business News Wales recently, although that does just seem to be a place to publish press releases
But then Bute are developers, and you would expect them to try to get well connected with whoever was in power. Developers are gonna develop, it’s what they do. But what they don’t do is long term ownership of energy assets
At least they try to get connected with U.K. politicians, and not Russian ones, like Traitor Gill. I was re-reading your old old articles about him recently and it’s clear that all those years ago he was as dodgy as ****! But then I suppose he had god on his side
Then somebody needs to update the info on Brenig on the CH website.
As for Gill, yes he’s a crook. But he should not have been sent down for what he did. He spoke up for Russia in the EU parliament. So? There’s currently a war between two sides, neither of them in NATO, the EU, so would someone speaking up for Ukraine be sent down? No. Why?
The current owners are shown but I forget exactly where I looked. I don’t know if historical stuff gets updated
Without reading the transaction of the court case I don’t know exactly the legal basis for his gaoling. Generally uk courts appear very lenient so he would probably have got life elsewhere, which is a pointer to the gravity of the crime. I’m sure it was not just speaking up for Russia
It’s a pointer to the political nature of the case. He was putting the Russian side.
Yes, he was showing support for the country that started a war with the country we are supporting
But I’d be shocked if that was illegal, so there has to be an awful lot more, and he did plead guilty to it
Two countries are at war. Why are ‘we’ taking sides at all?
It’s Russia, mun. Haven’t forgiven them yet for topping their Royalty over 100 years ago! Easy to forget that Ukraine helped Nazi Germany dispose of an assortment of Jews and other undesirables with an enthusiasm only matched by Croatia during WW2 yet both countries now backed by Western Europe while Russia is a full on pariah and Serbia is shunned. Serious duplicity but par for the course throughout history.
A good summation. Throw in that there’s a long-term plan to bring Russia to its knees and exploit its vast natural resources.
Whose plan is this? Normally you would expect it to be the US, but as long as Putin has the videos of Trump, he can’t do enough for them, quite happy to deliver Ukraine for the slaughter
“Videos of Trump“! You are a one!
Yet both Ukraine and Croatia in WWII were basically exploiting the presence of the nazis to throw off greater evils in their mind, communism or colonisation by Serbia. It was a case of your enemies enemy is your friend
Agreed. But the problem for me is that both Ukrainian Nazis and Croatian Ustashe were encouraged to re-emerge and revert to type when it suited the interests of certain elements in Western ‘democracies’.
Just like it suited Churchill to put the Greek collaborators in charge in WWII to keep out the pesky commies
The Greek Civil War took place in the aftermath of WWII and the tensions of the Cold War, ‘Iron Curtain’ and all that. The dismemberment of Jugoslavia using fascists and Jihadists, and the support for a Nazi-themed kleptocracy in Ukraine, have taken place in the period after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Done by Globalist-Deep State forces pushing agendas that serve no one but themselves.
Recycling old hatreds and grudges to suit a more contemporary purpose. Not cynical, are they?
Don’t go down that road. No country or government is squeaky clean. We can only try to improve. But that’s not going well, is it?
Because “we” think one is in the right and one is in the wrong. Exactly the same as when Germany declared war on Poland in 1939. We then declared war on Germany and we started WWII
The sequence of individual decisions gets lost in the common narrative as, think it was Hitler who said, history is written by the victors
I suspect any government that did not express explicit support for Ukraine at the time would be crucified by the electorate
But who’s ‘we’? I know more of the background to this conflict than most, and I know how it was deliberately engineered by the same lying bastards who’ve been pushing ‘global warming’ and other nonsense.
About all I can remember about the early stages of “conflict” within Eastern Ukraine, around 2010-12 perhaps, were shaky films captured on mobile phones of gangs of men dragging victims off the street and hearing the echo of shots from “round the corner”. Perpetrators then buzz off in unmarked cars. Read later that this was the early stages of CIA backed hit squads topping Russian separatists in those eastern provinces. Soon after, Putin invaded the east to “protect” Russians living in that zone. 10 years later it’s a serious mess without prospect of a peaceful solution but that Nazi taint persists to this day in my book.
When I was in my late teens I’d often go to a pub called The Three Lamps, overlooking Castle Gardens, first floor. It was a new pub, named after one that had gone in the Blitz, and had been frequented by Dylan Thomas when he was a cub reporter on the Evening Post. Every Saturday night, as stop tap approached, a group of middle-aged men speaking a language I didn’t recognise would start singing.
I learnt they were Ukrainian, and I wondered why they hadn’t gone home after the war. Perhaps they were anti-Communist? Well, yes, they were. And some! For a while there was even a Ukrainian drinking club in Morriston, a former pub they’d taken over. Mate of mine married the daughter of one of the leaders of the group.
Some of these guys couldn’t go home because they’d helped the Nazis. And that attitude, that outlook, is still there in Ukraine.
And there was exactly the same in Croatia, the Baltic States, even Germany! All part of a thriving Europe now
But it seems to have lingered on and embedded itself in Ukraine, to the point where Nazism is inseparable from Ukrainian nationalism, perhaps even Ukrainian identity.
It’s no different here with BritNat Faridge being a known admirer of Hitler and his dislike of democratic process
I’m fully expecting him to demand cancelling the May election and suspension of the Senedd following his little Chinese based “Reichstag fire”
You started off quite rationally, but now you’re being silly.
We’ll see
Drawing parallels with history is always useful, even if it would appear extreme or silly
In this case “we” is the majority of the U.K. population
All societies have a preference for their own, so it’s no surprise that purveyors of western style democracy would want to export that to Ukraine
I am one of those “lying bastards” who “pushes global warning”, but of course we don’t peddle it as nonsense
You think Ukraine is a democracy?
Not yet, but none of the ex soviet block countries that haven’t come under western democracy influence are. It certainly could be if Putin would just stop his war
Because he took money for it.
As usual, spot-on Jac! While you have Bute wriggling on the hook, it would be interesting to know who at Carmarthenshire County Council sanctioned an investment/’loan’ of £37m of the Local Government Pension, to Bute Energy.
Bute Energy secured £68m altogether from LGP – but more than half from Carmarthenshire!
What is very odd about this investment from CCC, is that the loan- as Bute like to call it – has gained value to over £43m – without a single 750ft machine up and spinning!
I admit that I’m just a humble ‘horny handed son of toil’. But my nose tells me that there is something rotten in the state of Bute!
I thought CCC was trying to get out of it?
Are they? Can they without incurring a penalty? What posessed them to go in so heavy? A lot of answers are needed Jac. This sort of deal reminds me of the late Robert Maxwell, the media barron when he tried to sell his junk shares in Mirror Group Newspapers, to the public. His famous quote was: “Even an one eyed Albanian can see it as a good deal”!
I’m not sure they have actually gone in to much at all. There has been lots in the press, but how much cash has actually been handed over, and on what terms, I’ve no idea
The Re-Think site has a copy of the investment report which describes the investment strategy into Bute. In short, put money into individual projects until consent was gained, then sell. A good “high risk, high return” approach
After the three directors extracted dividends to the same value as the PPW proposed investments, there was a wobble in confidence, and PPW changed from investing in, to lending money to. I imagine the majority of the £60 million has yet to be loaned
I’m sure you’re right, but I was more interested in exposing the level of political corruption Bute has brought to Wales. Over and above what we’d seen before.
I don’t actually know the legal definition of corruption. The word is vastly overused and I’ve not seen anything from Bute that isnt common business practice elsewhere in the U.K. We may not like what they are doing, because of what they want to build, but I’ve not seen anything I know to be illegal or anything other than just “commerce”
I’m suggesting corruption of the political system by buying political insiders to promote your schemes with their friends and partners, those who have the power to grant Bute planning permission and other benefits. John Uden, partner of Jenny Rathbone, would be a very good example. It’s not unknown, of course, but Bute has taken it to new levels.
If it’s simply lobbying, then we are entitled to know about it with a register of lobbyists.
Ah, so not that someone is being corrupt, but that the quality of our political system is being degraded
Haven’t such things happened since the beginning of time, the difference now is that we are aware of it
That awareness would make us all “woke”, technically
Amazing article Jac. Your best yet. I’m still absorbing all the helpful information you have provided and may comment again later.
Yes, there’s a lot needs to be said about Labour’s relationship with Bute. And I think it’s about time we had a statement from the ‘Welsh Government’. Though where Bute may have been clever is in not recruting sitting MPs or SMs.
You won’t get a statement from Welsh Government about this sort of shit show. May ’26 is too close and too many of the current regime will be looking for new “earning opportunities” probably actively canvassing the likes of Bute and a host of other carpetbagging ventures. Also too many are already in deep like the Rathbone dame and her old man.
As for the other parties we may well get some waffly mealy mouthed platitudes from likes of Rhun while his cohorts are working their bollox off looking for extra earnings wherever they can sell their cheap skinny little souls. Same goes for Darren M and his cronies as their hopes of surviving this year’s cataclysm are faint so lobbying and grifting will become an alternative pasture for most of them. Reform? here in Wales they seem to be drawing on the pool of talentless oiks that has fed the other parties for years so jumping onto the free loading wagon will be a primary skill for most of them.
I’m sure a few of the many standing down had a nice little earner lined up with Bute. But now?
There will be others. Gething may have screwed up any prospects within the waste disposal sector but no doubt something with pop up. Tir Natur type ventures always seem to be able to fund one talking head with an inflated view of his/her price tag.