If you really want to know who gets fat on solar subsidies, follow the money, not the hypocritical drivel of ODS ministers.


Will Mr Rittig get burnt?

Tomas Chalupa had a hissy fit over the weekend. His hysterical verbal assault on renewable energy was even quite convincing, given that Mr Chalupa is both a man and a government minister with responsibility for the environment -presumably for making it cleaner.

The self-righteous guff spewing out of the government on renewable energy grows more nauseating by the day. Perhaps some people really believe that the photovoltaic scam is all the fault of the ex-leader of the Greens and a retired state bureaucrat from the office of the energy regulator. If so, they have the memory of a medium-sized carp.

Swallow this bait if it fills your stomach. But if you would like to know who is really behind the scam, you might like to consider who is actually getting fat on solar subsidies. Five out of the 20 largest solar plants in the country are owned by firms with anonymous bearer shares. None of the investors from ODS and CSSD, or even from CEZ, has been hooked.

Not a surprise. The money trail leads to lots of shell companies represented by lawyers, in other words, nowhere. This is the Czech Republic after all –see here.

If CEZ is allowed to hide the beneficial owner of CEEI, the firm that built Temelin’s spent fuel storage facility, and if CEZ is allowed to hide the beneficial owner of I&C Energo, the firm that will provide the control systems for Temelin’s hoped-for new nuclear reactors, then do you really expect CEZ to reveal the owners of all those solar parks it acquired at a cost of some Kc 10 bn in 2010 alone?

It will not.

So we are left with conjecture. Here is one small piece of such conjecture –that when it came to photovoltaic investments, the opaque interests of some of CEZ’s top management under Martin Roman were put before the interests of the institution as a whole, and certainly before that part of the institution distributing electricity.

In early March 2010, as the lower house prepared to vote on three amendments to the law on renewable energy source support, the country’s three distributors, CEZ, E.ON and PRE, published a letter to members of the lower house in which they urged lawmakers to support changes to the law.

But the letter did not specify which of the three amendments before the chamber MPs should support –and it made a big difference. The government amendment set out to lower the subsidy burden whereas the other two amendments, both initiated by MPs, would have exacerbated the burden.

It is worth reminding ourselves of the background to the letter. The three distributors were alarmed at the size of the problem and were eager to moderate the impending solar boom. The government shared their concern.

The original version of the letter urged parliamentarians specifically to support the government amendment in third reading. The final version urged them merely to support amendment.

It was the CEO of CEZ Martin Roman that insisted upon the removal of the offending word ‘government’, thereby rendering the letter quite useless as a guide on how to vote. I assume that Roman acted under pressure from those politicians and businessmen who had invested in solar –presumably the very same people who were behind the targeted wording of the parliamentary initiatives put forward by MPs Plasil and Vojir.

If you need a scapegoat, these two gentlemen would serve your purpose better than Martin Bursik. But if you want to find the real winners in the solar business, you need to know the names of the beneficial owners of the firms that actually sold parks to CEZ.

And this is impossible without criminal charges being laid.

Plasil and Vojir will not tell you who persuaded them to put forward their amendments. And Roman will never tell you who leaned on him to remove the word ‘vládní ’from the letter issued by distributors. I suppose there must have been dozens of politicians who wanted their investment in a greener future protected, perhaps even hysterical government ministers? And perhaps even the chairmen of political parties at the time?

Above all, CEZ's top management will not tell you who it really shared all those billions with, even though it is appointed by a government that professes to be desperate to find the culprits.

Perhaps it was Matej Stropnicky?