New email shows Moy Park was alerted to lucrative RHI far earlier than previously thought

The email – which is among a huge volume of documentation released by the RHI Inquiry – shows that Moy Park had been made aware of the Renewable Heat Incentive’s financial benefits for poultry at a much earlier stage than previously thought.

In July 2011 - 16 months before RHI was launched - Paul Lyttle of Green Energy Engineering Ltd emailed Moy Park manager Brian Gibson to impress upon him the significance of the RHI scheme then being designed by Arlene Foster’s Stormont department.

He said that if the tariffs then proposed by the department were implemented, a poultry site – which he named but which has been blacked out by the inquiry – “would draw down in the region of £40k per year for 20 years.

He then said: “This would make biomass heating for poultry a no brainer”.
He then included a link to the public consultation from Mrs Foster’s department – a department in which a friend and neighbour, Andrew Crawford, was special adviser (spad) to the minister.

The significance of the email is that it was sent at a time when the scheme would have been far less lucrative than it ultimately became.

It was only the following year that a decision was taken to both increase the tariffs significantly and massively increase the size of boilers which would be allowed to claim the most lucrative subsidy.

In August 2013 – just nine months after RHI was launched – senior Moy Park manager David Mark made clear the company’s desire to get its farmers to install biomass boilers, and again demonstrated how closely the company was examining the financial figures involved in doing so, despite later misleading the public by claiming that it derived no financial benefit whatsoever from its farmers installing RHI boilers.

In an email to a colleague he asked for a meeting, explaining that the intention was to discuss biomass boilers. He said: “Really I am looking at how we get the broiler farms moving on to biomass - both new builds and existing.” He asked: “What is realistic? What is the best model (RHI boiler sizing, fuel security/options, funding options, etc)?”

The RHI Inquiry did not criticise Moy Park or other companies which had taken advantage of the riches on offer, saying that “it would have been unrealistic to expect the commercial market to act altruistically in relation to a commercially attractive scheme such as the NI RHI.”

A spokesperson for Moy Park said: “Having participated fully with the inquiry process, we welcomed the publication of its report in March which found no fault with the company’s use of the RHI scheme. Its findings and recommendations were not directed towards the business.”

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