Who are Galileo?
Galileo Empower is the company proposing to build a massive industrial-scale energy park on Mynydd Mawr.
Galileo Empower has no experience of constructing a wind farm – its website lists 4 projects in Wales, 7 in Scotland, 3 in Ireland, 12 in Sweden and 5 in Germany. Of these, only two Swedish projects have received planning permission, and for only five others (one in Sweden, four in Scotland) have planning applications been made. The remaining 24 are at the “environmental studies”phase. The company is actively proposing wind energy projects around the UK but has never actually built one anywhere in the world.
Galileo Empower Wales Ltd, incorporated in April 2021, operates out of a serviced office facility in Cardiff. It is a wholly owned subsidiary of Galileo Empower Ltd, a company registered in Scotland in 2020. Galileo Empower’s directors are Filippo Chiesa and Paolo Grossi, both Italians; Nikolaus Mainka and Ingmar Wilhelm, both Germans; and two Irish citizens, Marc McLoughlin and Diarmuid Twomey, who is the company’s CEO. The company’s most recent accounts show that it has capital of £37 million and lost £5 million in the year to March 2024.
Galileo Empower has 55 subsidiaries across the UK, Ireland, Germany and Sweden. Its parent company is Galileo Green Energy GmbH, a Swiss company that in turn is owned by four investors from Australia and New Zealand:
- The NZ Superfund, an investment fund owned and run by the New Zealand government to cover the country’s pension obligations.
- The Commonwealth Superannuation Corporation, which manages pension funds for Australian civil servants and Defence Force employees.
- Infratil, a New Zealand-based investment fund listed on the New Zealand and Australian stock exchanges and managed by
- H. R. L. Morrison, a New Zealand asset manager with undisclosed investors that specialises in infrastructure investment.
20% of Galileo Empower’s ordinary shares are owned by Galileo Renewables Ltd, a UK company whose shareholders include McLoughlin and Twomey alongside a handful of other individual investors.
Overall, the ownership structure shows that any profit from Galileo Empower’s investments will end up benefiting a) institutional investors in the southern hemisphere and b) a handful of individuals with no connection to Wales.
Ownership structure of Galileo Empower