Letters / Shed a tear for SSE
SCOTTISH and Southern Energy brought a tear to my eye this week with their donation of £40,000 to a charity.
This amount is Energy Action Scotland’s share of a £2.5 million payout to eight charities and will be used to raise awareness of the help available to people struggling to pay their household fuel bills.
So did this overwhelmingly generous donation come from SSE’s annual profit of £1.5 billion? Did it any of it reduce SSE chief executive Alistair Phillips-Davies’s pay package of £2.7 million last year?
Well, actually, no. It didn’t. To put not too fine point on it, this donation was due to money illegally taken from SSE customers in the past.
The donation came from something called Sales Guarantee Fund. This Guarantee, launched in 2011, reimburses any household customers who switched their energy supply to SSE after being given inaccurate or misleading information and who were disadvantaged as a result.
Not that SSE would deliberately set out to do anything naughty after 2011. I’m sure it was just bad luck that SSE was fined £10.5 million in 2013 for mis-selling.
This is the same SSE who (they say through no fault of their own) makes fuel poverty in Shetland worse than need be by imposing a hidden 2p surcharge on their loyal consumers in the Highland and Islands.
This is the same trustworthy SSE who owns half the Shetland wind farm project that will change Shetland’s landscape forever.
The other half of the wind farm is owned by our much beloved Viking Energy Ltd. Yes folks, that’s right, Viking Energy only own half the wind farm.
Shetland Charitable Trust own 90 per cent of shares in Viking Energy (45 per cent of the wind farm). This is the community liability on the people of Shetland. Remaining 10 per cent is held by four individuals, one of whom works either as a consultant or employee of Viking Energy Ltd.
SSE’s half of the wind farm liability is owned through a subsidiary company called SSE Viking Ltd.
In the event of the Viking project making a loss, or going bust, it is this subsidiary company that would have to carry half the can (or walk away), not the parent company SSE.
The other half of such a financial disaster would fall on the Shetland community that never wanted to see the thing built in the first place.
Allen Fraser
Meal
Hamnavoe
Burra
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