Wednesday, November 19, 2008

F&S Oil biodiesel plant may go to Citizens Bank

From the NHRs Luther Turmelle:

The court-appointed receiver overseeing the liquidation of F&S Oil has filed a motion in Superior Court to turn over a biofuels plant the firm had been developing in Cheshire to Citizens Bank after failing to auction off the plant for a fair price.

Though the plant had been set for auction several times over the past few months, the auction finally opened on October 23 to non-stellar results:

The Oct. 23 auction produced one approved bidder for the entire plant: Total Energy Solutions, a Portsmouth, N.H.-based home-heating oil and gasoline provider. Total Energy Solutions offered $75,000 for the plant, plus a percentage of the profits over a 10-year period.

But at the auction, which included a piecemeal sell-off of all the components of the plant that netted only about $54,000, the decision was made to keep the sale open for another three weeks.

During that time, Helming said, it has become evident that “a confluence of issues — landlord interference, declining economic conditions, declining fuel prices and rapidly developing technology” make it impossible for him to sell the plant for anything approaching the $4.3 million that was spent by F&S developing the plant.


I hope this saga comes to a close soon... and prepaid customers get back something... though I'm guessing it'll be less than what they are owed.

It'd also be nice if the plant could finally open and create some jobs. I'd much rather spend my money in Cheshire, than in Saudi Arabia.

Tim White

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Tim,

Your miss guided on this issue. All efforts are local not national. Thinking that what we do will affect national energy issue sis wrong.

All you need to know is if the Bowman's in any way are associated with local energy issues they are in it for the money and not for the sake of the consumer.

Tim White said...

The concept of "social responsibility" is just emerging. Go back ten years in time and virtually every decision was based on the bottom line.

As a consumer, I appreciate socially responsible companies. But I'm not yet at the point where I expect it.

Anonymous said...

I agree with Carlton Helming. The Bowmans have been far from cooperative and the only reason one can arrive at is that they want to get the Bio plant either cheap or for free.

Carlton says 27 Bowman families are owners of the Cheshire Investment LLC and it is hard to believe that they don't seem to care about their reputation or the interests of all the people that lost money to F&S. There doesn't seem to be any social responsibility here.

How difficult is it for a landlord to clearly specify the terms of a lease so that a bidder knows what the score is before they wast a lot of their time and money.

Give me a break.