Nicola Sturgeon has been accused of allowing overseas firms “with woeful human rights records” to profit from Scotland’s offshore wind projects.
Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar said the ScotWind leasing round announcement earlier this week had “sold on the cheap” permission for 17 new offshore wind farms along Scotland’s coast.
Contracts worth almost £700m were awarded on Monday, with Sturgeon describing the deal as “one of the most exciting things for Scotland in a long, long time”.
But at First Minister’s Questions on Thursday, Sarwar raised the “questionable human rights records” of some of the successful firms.
He also warned that foreign countries would have a bigger stake in the offshore energy produced in Scotland than the Scottish Government.
Sarwar said: “This SNP Government have sold on the cheap the right to profit from Scotland’s energy transition to multinational companies with questionable human rights records.
“One of the new owners of Scotland’s seabed were fined $54m for bribing Nigerian officials and $88m for bribing Indonesian officials.
“Another one was found to have contributed to human rights abuses at one of its construction sites, of destroying villages in Myanmar, of relying on forced labour and using slavery to build pipelines.
“Surely these aren’t people the Scottish Government should be doing business with?”
Cases referenced by Sarwar include the Marubeni Corporation that, in partnership with SSE, has been awarded rights for a floating offshore wind turbine site across 858 sq km of seabed.
The Japanese organisation paid a the multimillion-dollar penalty in connection with a decade-long scheme to bribe Nigerian government officials for engineering, procurement and construction contracts.
France’s TotalEnergies, which in a consortium secured rights to develop a wind farm off the west coast of Orkney, was implicated in historic claims that the military government in Burma had used forced labour and its soldiers had employed murder and rape in the laying of a pipeline through the country.
Sturgeon said there were “appropriate processes in place to do due diligence” on the consortiums allowed to develop the offshore projects, and said the deal “offers massive potential to Scotland”.
Sturgeon added: “Not only does this give us the potential to meet our own energy needs from renewable sources, it positions us with the ability to be a major exporter of renewable energy, including green hydrogen, and it gives enormous potential for our supply chain.”
Sarwar replied: “This is about the Scottish supply chain, Scottish companies and Scottish jobs.
“Because the sad reality is that this is an SNP Government that doesn’t understand economic development: Scottish bridges built with Chinese steel, Scottish wind farms with turbines built in Indonesia, ferries not built at Scottish shipyards but built in Poland and Turkey, and now Scotland’s seabed owned by foreign multinationals with woeful human rights records.”
On Wednesday, Scottish Energy Secretary Michael Matheson insisted that the Scottish Government was “doing everything we can” to ensure offshore energy contracts benefit Scotland, after criticism that they were awarded to overseas firms.
Scottish Labour’s Colin Smyth challenged the minister on how he would ensure that the bulk of the work on the project takes place in Scotland, rather than merely “crumbs”.
Warning that the “penalties for failing to deliver developer statements are negligible”, Smyth added: “The award of these licences is an opportunity for the Scottish economy and Scottish jobs; but this time it must not be squandered.
“History has shown us that developers can go elsewhere, they will go elsewhere.”
Matheson, who previously stated that he would be meeting with all the successful bidders this week, said: “I accept that we have not achieved the level and scale of inward investment and supply chain development in our renewable sector that we would have wanted to.
“That’s why it’s absolutely critical that we maximise the potential benefits from this particular ScotWind leasing round.”
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