Barryroe granted examinership on flimsy premise

As British prime minister Rishi Sunak pledged on Monday morning to grant hundreds of licences for oil and gas drilling in the North Sea to make the United Kingdom more energy independent, the fate of the company behind the Republic’s only commercial find was hanging in the balance.

Barryroe Offshore Energy (BOE) was on the cusp of calling in a liquidator early last week after Minster for the Environment Eamon Ryan refused in May to grant a key permit for its key Barryroe oil project off the Cork coast, which was deemed in 2012 to have more than 300 million barrels of recoverable oil.

However, Mr Justice Michael Quinn of the High Court decided on Monday — on foot of an application by BOE’s biggest shareholder, beef baron Larry Goodman — that the company could be restructured under examinership.

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The only hope of the Barryroe project being revived is through a successful application for a judicial review of the Green Party leader’s decision, which is largely seen as a political one.

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While the Minister found a reason in one of the technical financial criteria issued by his department four years ago — that an explorer should have net assets of at least 3½ times the value of a phase of work being done — to pull the plug, he is under no obligation to follow the guidelines.

The independent expert’s report backing up the examinership petition makes no mention of the real purpose of the exercise: that BOE be kept alive to be run as a litigation vehicle against the State.

Green revolution

Instead, it pitches the notion that BOE, with additional investment from Goodman’s Vevan Unlimited vehicle, a 20 per cent shareholder, could become part of the green revolution. “Vevan is of the view that the [BOE] could develop its business model based on green energy and securing energy which benefits from lower CO2 emissions,” the report said.

There is plenty of such expertise in Goodman’s empire. His Olleco renewable energy business, established in 2006, is the UK’s largest collector of food waste and used cooking oil.

But using examinership laws — originally enacted to save Goodman’s beef empire in 1990 — to restructure a company on the premise of it pursuing a different business model seems a bit of a stretch.