Moy Park’s chief sent an email of thanks over RHI scheme extension
THE former chief executive of Moy Park sent an email to company officials congratulating them on successfully lobbying to have the closure of a botched green energy scheme extended, the RHI Inquiry heard yesterday.
Janet McCollum, who left her role with the poultry giant earlier this year, also accepted that Moy Park benefited financially from involvement in the controversial scheme.
RHI had been due to close on February 16, 2016, but the inquiry heard how there was a twoweek delay and it eventually shut at the end of that month.
Ms McCollum had emailed Moy Park executives at the time saying: “Thank you for all your encouragement and involvement in securing this extension — well done.”
Asked about what they had done to help extend the deadline, Ms McCollum confirmed Moy Park officials were lobbying with the Ulster Farmers’ Union and the Confederation of British Industry on behalf of farmers who had invested in biomass boilers but had yet to get their RHI applications submitted.
On January 15, 2016, then-Finance Minister Mervyn Storey and his DUP adviser Andrew Crawford, who has given evidence to the inquiry, met Moy Park executives including Ms McCollum.
Ms McCollum said she “specifically” remembers Mr Crawford
telling them that the scheme would soon be closing.
Mr Crawford previously denied that he tipped off Moy Park about the scheme’s end.
The inquiry also heard how Moy Park had been kept well informed at various points in 2015 about the progress of the planned changes to RHI that would make it less lucrative. Department of Enterprise officials gave Moy Park “hot off the press information” about what was happening before it was signed off by the minister, inquiry barrister Donal Lunny said.
It has already heard evidence that the poultry industry was the root cause of a spike in applications to the scheme in 2015, when plans were under way to bring it under control.
Officials wanted to introduce tariffs that October to reduce the level of lucrative subsidies claimants could earn, but a further four-week delay allowed a massive spike in applications to the scheme, which had a huge impact on the public purse.
Ms McCollum admitted Moy Park “definitely contributed”, but did not drive the spike.
She also told the panel she could now see how the company had benefited “indirectly” but argued any benefit would have been “a small one.”
Mr Lunny said: “If it’s a benefit of a couple of million pounds a year that might be a small benefit to an organisation the size of Moy Park, but it’s still a very significant amount of money.”
Moy Park was only paying about half the cost of farmers’ biomass fuel bills.
Producers were able to bear the cost because substantial RHI subsidies more than made up the income gap.
Mr Lunny said Moy Park had a “sophisticated” organisation when it came to costs and pricing and suggested it would have been obvious to the company what was happening.
But Ms McCollum said the firm had not identified the fuel cost differential as an indirect benefit to it at that point.
Mr Lunny suggested it did not take a genius to work it out.