The Massachusetts native who helped found controversial wind-energy developers Cape Wind and First Wind expressed surprise late last week at news that his one-time partner in a separate wind-energy company in Italy has been arrested and charged with fraud.
“I read about it in the papers, and I was very surprised,” Brian Caffyn said from Hong Kong, where he is now building wind-energy farms in China and the Philipines.
“I know of no fraud with (former partners) Oreste (Vigorito) and IVPC,” said Caffyn, a Cape Cod native and Babson College graduate.
IVPC is Italian Vento Power Corp., a company that Caffyn, 50, once owned with Vigorito, a well-known Italian soccer club president. The pair worked together for seven years in Italy and even lived next door to each other for a time.
Last week, the Italian finance police arrested Vigorito, his Sicilian business associate Vito Nicastri and two others, according to the Financial Times. Eleven others were charged in a probe dubbed “Gone with the Wind” that began in 2007, the Financial Times said.
The group is accused of committing fraud by obtaining millions in public subsidies to build wind farms that either never worked properly or did not supply the promised amounts of energy, the Financial Times reported.
Vigorito has no connection to Cape Wind or First Wind.
Caffyn, who has amassed a fortune starting wind-energy companies, sold his interest in Cape Wind in 2002. He sold his interest in IVPC in 2005, according to First Wind spokesman John Lamontagne. Caffyn remains a shareholder and director with First Wind, Lamontagne wrote in an e-mail statement.
Last February, as part of a parallel probe, Italy’s anti-Mafia police arrested eight others, including an alleged Mafia boss, and accused them of corruption in a wind farm project, the Financial Times reported.
According to corporate filings, Caffyn was a founding partner in Cape Wind, the wind-energy turbine project slated for Nantucket Sound. He went on to establish UPC Wind Management LLC, now known as First Wind.
In the United States, where the Department of Energy has recently set aside $100 billion in cash grants for the clean-energy sector, both Cape Wind and First Wind have been accused by critics of taking advantage of pro-alternative energy programs for financial gain.
In 2006, the Beacon Hill Institute at Suffolk University undertook the most comprehensive review yet of Cape Wind’s public subsidies.
“What we found was quite remarkable,” David Tuerck, the institute’s executive director, said at the time. “Cape Wind stands to receive subsidies worth $731 million, or 77 percent of the cost of installing the project and 48 percent of the revenues it would generate. The policy question that this amount of subsidy raises is whether the project’s benefit is worth the huge public subsidies that the developer gets.”
Cape Wind spokesman Mark Rogers said the wind farm would only receive government monies after it is up and working, and meeting certain production criteria.
“It’s all performance-based,“ he said.
In September, after First Wind affiliates received $115 million in federal stimulus money, U.S. Rep. Eric J. Massa (D-N.Y.) wrote to President Barack Obama, calling the grants “very alarming” and saying the company “abused the public trust.
“No electricity has been produced for sale out of the projects,” but the company “has already collected production rewards for non-existent energy,” Massa told Obama.
First Wind CEO Paul Gaynor, a former Enron executive, responded in a letter to Obama, saying that First Wind’s New York wind farms have produced 133,370 megawatt hours of clean, renewable energy. “We are proud of our work in New York and appreciate the grants we received,” he wrote.
Caffyn, whose 2007 divorce records show he amassed an $82 million fortune building wind farms around the world, said late last week that all the completed projects he has been involved with were properly constructed and met the promised performance standards.
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