Solar 21 investors see €122m of their cash wiped out in liquidation of group’s power station firm

A subsidiary of Solar 21 called GB-Bio – which owned the Tansterne Biomass plant near Hull in the UK – was placed into liquidation, owing a total of over £128m (€145m) to its creditors. At the time of its liquidation, the firm had total assets available to distribute to preferential creditors of just over £103,000, according to a statement of affairs prepared by the company in July. Money funnelled into GB-Bio from funds raised through loan notes marketed by its Solar 21 parent company and purchased by a large number of Irish retail investors – mainly from pensions and other savings – made up the vast bulk of what was owed to GB-Bio’s creditors. One industry source said the liquidation of GB-Bio likely marked “one of the biggest write-offs of Irish retail investor funds in a single project in recent years.” They added: “Over €120m poured into Tansterne over a decade – and absolutely nothing to show for it at the end, not even worth scrap metal it seems.” The plant never worked properly, despite regular assurances that it was nearly ready The statement of affairs for GB-Bio, now in liquidation, showed that one creditor, another Solar 21 subsidiary called Biomass 21 Renewable Energy Limited (B21RE), was owed £107.2m (€122m). Much of that money was raised by Solar 21 in Ireland between 2018 and 2020 in a fundraising push by the Rathcoole-based renewable energy investment vehicle, owned at the time by Achill Island brothers Michael and Andrew Bradley. The funds – invested in Solar 21 fundraising companies as part of its Project 1 funding drive, of which Tansterne was a central part – had been channelled to GB-Bio through B21RE, company records show. In 2019, Solar 21 had told investors in its Project 1 batch of investments (of which Tansterne was a central part): “What began as a 12-acre greenfield site is now a functioning biomass plant which will consume 150,000 tonnes of waste wood per year at full capacity. “Investors will be receiving their initial investment, plus a return of 31.5pc. Brokers have been liaising with their clients to plan the maturity process,” said the newsletter. The sale of the Tansterne plant – which the company had valued at over €100m just two years ago – had long been touted as a key part of the plan to raise the money to repay investors. But in reality, the plant never worked properly, despite regular assurances that its commissioning was close. The statement of affairs records that the biomass plant had a book value of £60m but would realise an estimated £1.6m, valuing it at little more than the metal used to build it. In June, it was sold by GB-Bio as part of a “pre-pack -administration” for a total sale price of €4m. That price included €3.3m of debt, meaning the sale did not provide any return to the scheme of arrangement that was sanctioned by the High Court in Dublin in November 2023 as a way to repay the hundreds of millions pumped into Solar 21 by its Irish investors.