By Graham Smith

Cornwall Council leader Julian German is due to approve a further multi-million bail-out for the Hayle Wave Hub, in the hope that it can one day become part of a private-sector offshore wind energy project.

Mr German is due to make the “individual decision” on 29^th March – without formal reference to his council cabinet colleagues, and inside the so-called “purdah” period which is supposed to prohibit controversial decisions in the run-up to elections on 6^th May.

The Wave Hub is asking the council for an immediate cash injection of £435,000 – which it says it needs to keep going, whether or not a long-planned sale to the private sector ever happens.

The decision by Mr German is then necessary to complete the sale of the Wave Hub, taking it out of direct council control, before the end of March. The original deadline for selling off the Wave Hub had been December 2020.

The terms of the proposed sale now require the council to lend the project a further £1 million immediately, and to then take a further £4 million out of a special reserve fund which had been ring-fenced exclusively for decommissioning costs.

The requirement for Mr German to make his “individual decision” is not entirely without some scrutiny: a progress report on the proposed sale is due to come before a committee of councillors next week.

The council has hired accountants KPMG to act as agents for the sale, which it says is “now close to conclusion.

“The sale details and participants are commercial-in-confidence and will remain so until transaction completion, but the current process envisages a Mar-21 completion date.

“The sale will be of Wave Hub Limited (WHL), the company, with all of the project’s offshore assets included. Non-Sale assets [will be] transferred to a separate company, Wave Hub Development Services Limited (WHDS), whose ownership [will be] transferred to Cornwall Council and which will take over all non-sale related operations currently undertaken by WHL.”

The council is still nevertheless preparing for the possibility that the sale might fall through, in which case it plans to spend £2.65 million on decommissioning. In 2016 the government gave the council a £15 million “dowry” to protect local taxpayers against future costs associated with the project. That dowry is now almost spent and still the Wave Hub has not delivered on its original 20-year-old promise.