ONE MORE THING:NTR'S TROUBLES over the last few years took their toll on one of the utility's shareholders, figures just released to the Companies Registration Office show.
Dreamport, which holds the Roche family’s near 40 per cent interest in the group, has just filed accounts showing that it wrote €74 million off the value of its main asset, namely the stake in NTR, at the end of 2010.
NTR’s shares are traded on the grey market. The notes to Dreamport’s accounts state that as trading is infrequent, the directors carried out a detailed exercise of their own to arrive at a fair value for the stake.
The result was that they calculated that the shares were worth €1.50.
Accordingly, Dreamport’s stake on December 31st, 2010, was worth at €118.3 million, compared with €192.4 million 12 months earlier.
The write-down coincided with a turbulent period in NTR’s recent history.
The same year, the group took a €96 million hit on its US solar energy venture. It followed this up with a further €42 million write-down on the same business, from which it has since exited.
The solar business was in one way a casualty of the financial crisis, which produced an environment in which banks were unwilling to back such ventures.
NTR’s policy over the past two years has been to focus more on its US wind energy businesses, which are operational and thus producing revenues. The solar project was only at the very early stage of its development.
Recently, the business published accounts showing that in the 12 months ended March 31st (its financial year) it cut losses to €89 million from €381 million in the previous 12-month period. The Roche family owns Dreamport through its parent, Woodford.