The Tories could turn to Manchester City’s boss to help build a £20billion nuclear power station in Britain, it emerged today.
Ministers are desperate for foreign investors to pump cash into the Sizewell C on the Suffolk coast after they kicked China out of the deal. Beijing was removed from the project, which is led by French energy firm EDF, amid national security concerns.
The UK Government spent nearly £100million buying the Chinese state-owned company China General Nuclear out of its 20% stake. But expelling the Chinese has left a financial black hole for funding the vital development, which will eventually supply enough energy for six million homes.
A United Arab Emirates sovereign wealth fund run by Abu Dhabi-based Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the owner of Manchester City, has been sounded out about injecting money, The Times reported. A government source confirmed that Mubadala, which controls assets worth £219bn and of which the Gulf royal is chairman, was being considered. "They are part of the mix of options but not the only viable one," a source told the paper.
Boris Johnson announced £700m of taxpayers' cash for the nuke plant project received last September in one of his last acts as Prime Minister. Speaking at the site in East Anglia, the doomed Premier said in his final major policy speech: "We need to pull our national finger out and get on with Sizewell C. That's why we're putting £700m into the deal, just part of the £1.7bn of Government funding available for developing a large-scale nuclear project to final investment stage in this Parliament.”
He claimed it would be "madness" not to go ahead with the project which would "fix the energy needs, not just of this generation but of the next". It is not expected to begin generating electricity until the 2030s at the earliest.