Efforts to get the owners of British sports automobile brand TVR to base a brand new factory in Wales could have wasted hundreds of thousands of kilos.
In 2021 the Welsh Government spent £4.75 million buying a brownfield site, home to an abandoned Techboard factory, plus one other £7.6m on refurbishment able to welcome TVR Automotive’s automobile production facility, and it also gave TVR a £2m loan and invested £500,000 in a stake within the business.
The aim was for the automobile factory to create 150 jobs locally and produce as much as 2,000 sports cars. But TVR Automotive has since decided it won’t be based in Wales, and it’s reportedly securing a brand new home in Hampshire.
Adrian Crompton, the auditor general for Wales, informed the Welsh Parliament that selling the 180,000sq ft property for a market value of about £7.5m would net taxpayers a lack of £4.85m.
Ministers have been trying to seek out another tenant since November. The federal government said: “It represents a implausible opportunity for any business to amass a contemporary manufacturing facility within the region.”
Officials had advised to carry off the refurbishment until a lease was secured from TVR, nonetheless in August 2020 the Welsh Government wrote to TVR informing it the federal government would progress the refurbishment “with or without them”, in accordance with Crompton.
Crompton said TVR breached loan requirements in September 2016 since it had not secured a promised £5.5m private-sector investment to begin production.
He added that TVR negotiated extensions to the Welsh Government’s loan default requirement, which otherwise would have led to early repayment in full.
In April 2022, TVR paid the Welsh Government £4.3m, covering the £2m loan and accrued interest, which released the corporate from a requirement to base itself in Wales.
In 2006 the then Russian owner of TVR, Nikolay Smolensky, closed the Blackpool base of TVR, just three years before the death of TVR founder Trevor Wilkinson.
Smolensky talked of moving production to Italy. Then in 2013 Smolensky sold the TVR brand, mental property and remaining assets to a consortium led by Les Edgar, who’s the one aiming to relaunch the automobile maker under TVR Automotive Ltd.
This Article First Appeared At www.am-online.com
