Reykjavík City Council decided at a meeting yesterday to reject the merger between Reykjavík Energy Invest (REI) and Geysir Green Energy (GGE), which was accepted at a Reykjavík Energy (OR) board meeting last October 3.
Reykjavík City holds a share in OR.
The REI-GGE merger has been extremely controversial and elected representatives of Reykjavík City Council, who attended the OR board meeting, claim they did not have sufficient information to know exactly what they had agreed upon October 3, ruv.is reports.
Reykjavík City has thus decided to vote against the merger between REI and GGE as well as against an agreement that REI shall be privileged to service from OR for the next 20 years.
The City Council has assigned the project of working against the merger to the board of OR and also to make an administrative enquiry of OR’s operations.
Svandís Svavarsdóttir, the City Council’s vice chairman and the leader of the multi-partisan investigative committee called to look into the legality of the merger, said that although many opportunities are involved in the expansion of Icelandic energy companies in foreign markets, the merger cannot be finalized because its acceptance had been based on nearly no information at all.
“We are going to continue with what we were doing,” chairman of GGE’s board and CEO of FL Group Hannes Smárason told Fréttabladid. “People cannot sit here and fight about nothing and think that the world will wait for them, it doesn’t work that way. People have to move quickly if they want to participate in this game.”
“We have a certain window now to succeed [in the global energy market],” Smárason continued. “The world is suddenly looking at this source of energy [geothermal], which means that we will compete about projects with many of the world’s largest companies.”
“When written agreements are made they cannot be revoked one-sided without consequences,” Smárason concluded.
Click here to read more about the REI-GGE merger.
