WHO is footing the bill for sweco pic,gunns or the good ol taxpayer.the latter ill bet.

for your information, the email address of the leader of the assessment team is

.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)

Maybe all good Tasmanians should tell him our version of the Pulp Mill saga and why good Finns should stay out of it.  At the same time, why not tell their CEO, .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address), their CFO .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address), and head of communications .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address), and others .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address), what we think of SWECO involvement.

Steve Kons reckons SWECO employs 3,500 people, but the company’s official website says 1,100.  This government can not get simple facts right, or can not help spruiking everything that has to do with this project and employment.  At least this is only 3 times as bad as Gunns getting their emission figures 45 times wrong.  Either way, even simple examinations seem to point towards either total incompetence or criminal neglect, most likely both.  Can’t wait for the result of the assessment, it will be world’s best type rubbish no doubt.  I wonder how far Lennon and Gunns can really push this farce?

Do I DARE suggest that Sweco seem to resemble Jaako Poyry, Gunns’ consultants who have pushed for the development of pulp mill projects the world over?

No.  Surely Not.  That’s it, people; I’m afraid due process in Tasmania is officially Finnished.

Gunns is the mark.

They have been sold a pulp mill by Jaakko Poyry and Andritz, both of whom will share heavily in the $1.4 bn that Gunns has to find. Doubtless Poyry will help them to find it too.

The government has also been flattered by Poyry’s sales pitches, hence the trips to Finland etc.

Gunns isn’t driving this…Poyry is.

Gunns doesn’t know anything about pulp mills…they didn’t just wake up one day and say ‘worlds biggest pulp mill’. They were sweet talked into it by Poyry/Andritz, lots of castles in the air, dinners and plane rides, not their money. Poyry needs more work, plus 10% commission on $1.4 bn is a lot.

We’ve seen the marks being taken before with Spirit, Hawthorn, Basslink, Alinta, Waterfront…they’re suckers waiting to be taken.

Now it’s Sweco…another Scandinavian pulp mill and engineering services company that also works with Andritz.

Will they approve the mill? What do you think?

“SWECO PIC has solid practical experience of pulp and paper processes, since many of our experts have worked in pulp and paper mills in demanding positions. Through experience gathered from numerous projects, we can assume responsibility both for consulting assignments requiring in-depth special expertise and for extensive total engineering and project management assignments, all the way from the study phase to commissioning and final operation.” (SWECO PIC web site)

This is the extensive CV that I am sure Mr Kons and his cronies have read through and accepted openly.

“But industry analyst Robert Eastment of Edge forest products consultancy in Hobart had heard of Sweco Pic and, after finding out more about the group from industry associates in Scandinavia yesterday, is reasonably happy with the choice.” (Mercury 18/04/07).

Oh great at least someone has heard of them in Tassie. Confirmed by overseas mates. “Reasonably happy with the choice”……what does that mean????

Well then it has to be a goer now doesn’t it?

SWECO PIC proudly makes children’s playgrounds. (as one of its main website features will tell you).
They may like to make a nice one at Long Reach?

Perhaps for this project SWECO PIC can give its Ukraine office a bell…….

$500k is top dollar for a rubber stamp I would have thought…..

The show still goes on…....

“... we can assume responsibility ...” $500k doesn’t buy responsiblity for 1.4billion. Maybe they took some gold tipped hawks socks with them! Are some of you politicians and directors so full of yourselves that you really think that so many can be hoodwinked? You forget, you are supposed to responsibly govern and direct, not wield power. You fool yourselves if you think we will forget, reap as you sow. New Zealand is filling one of their volcanoes with crap, off you go.

What is the worth of the pulp mill?  It has almost doubled in price according to The Age http://www.theage.com.au/news/National/Tas-politicians-to-decide-on-pulp-mill/2007/04/17/1176696821636.html - now worth 2 billion!  Until recently it was 1.2 billion in most media reports.  The media have a lot to answer for in spreading the bull…. about the rubbery value of the mill, the wealth and the jobs it will create. 
Seems to be a case of say it often enough and the gullible masses will believe anything - which is what happened before the last election that put the two-headed monster of the ALP and Libs into power in this State.
Does the media games that Rudd is playing and his meetings with Burke ring alarm bells with anyone else?  A little bit of Graham Richardson’s “whatever it takes”?  I suspect that Rudd is as shallow and devious as his Tasmanian colleagues.  And where is Garrett - hidden away and gagged it seems.  I will be giving the major parties a wide berth for many years to come and trust a sizable number of thinking Australians will do the same.
When two parties are as blatant about only representing the rich and speak with one voice as the LibLabs are doing, drastic voting measures are called for - starting with the ousting of Allison Ritchie I trust.

The Sweco Group has joined the “Swedish Partnership for Global Responsibility” as noted on their website (http://www.sweco.se/templates/Page____17121.asp#)

“In 2003 SWECO was one of the first companies to join the Swedish Partnership for Global Responsibility (Globalt Ansvar), the Swedish Government’s answer to Secretary-General Kofi Annan’s Global Compact, which was initiated by the UN and has gained wide support among the world’s leading companies. By taking this step, SWECO has pledged to pursue and advocate issues related to human rights, religion, culture, tradition, health, labour rights and anti-corruption, in its strategy, culture and day-to-day operations.”

While the consultant’s scope for the Pulp Mill Assessment is likely to be very narrow, Sweco has an obligation under this Compact to address the wider issues of health and community, etc.

Moreover, “WECO supports the “Code of Ethics” formulated by the international consulting industry organisation FIDIC, and respects the rules and recommendations issued by the UN, the World Bank, the OECD and the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida) for companies operating in the international arena”.

Sweco has a duty to say “NO” with respect to the Pulp Mill if it does not meet emissions guidelines, and is likely to detrimentally affect the health of nearby communities and the environment.

In particular, the air emissions modelling does not meet US EPA guidelines and has not been validated against observed ground-level data for NOx, SO2 and particulates. As a respected group of consulting engineers committed to implementing FIDIC standards and the Globalt Ansvar, SWECO must insist that the results of the current CSIRO air emissions study become available before they can complete their report (assuming of course, that the outcome of this study is up to appropriate international standards).

There are approximately 12,000 pages of submissions (both Gunns, RPDC and public). The reading of these, at 1 page/minute, would take 5 weeks (8 hours/day, 5 days/week). Again, Sweco must insist it be given the time to properly assess the information contained in each of these documents. If it does not, and as is likely the Mill turns out to be a health and environmental disaster, Sweco could be the subject of legal action both in Australia, Sweden, Finland and International courts. Joining the Globalt Ansvar is not just good PR, it also carries with it responsibility.

Last night their website was copyright 2007.
Ooh I just checked it, they’ve changed it to 2004.
And there’s been quite a bit of activity on it overnight.
Their CEO started in 2007.
Their records go back to 2004 when the talks started.

We should be fairly grateful that the government is looking to employ a large organisation (and hopefuly one insured by the Swiss or Lloyds) rather than Paul Lennon’s brother (oops, not the family again).

This way when the Supreme Court has shut the mill down for breaching its emission limits and Gunns has gone bankrupt, there will be somebody to sue. Sweco and their insurers can pay for cleaning up the Tamar, maintaing the sludge dam for the next thousand years, compensating fishermen and building a new respiratory illness wing on the hospital.

Or they might just decide to do their job properly and say no.

PS: From project finance experience, all consultants will say they can do the job in 6 weeks IF ALL THE INFORMATION IS IN ORDER. When this turns out not to be the case, the review spins out for the next year.

hey, Shady Deals - I don’t suppose you or anybody else happened to save or screenshot a copy of the SWECO page befor it got modified?

Here’s the most detailed non-Finnish run down I could find on SWECO
http://pulpinc.files.wordpress.com/2006/09/sweco-pdf-as-sent-18304.pdf

Says a lot about building dams and ignoring local concerns (bingo) but not too much about their pulp and paper proficiency. If you can’t open the link in explorer, download and install Firefox 2.0.0.0 browser or higher and enable to either read PDF in tabs or automatically download.

http://www.sweco.se/upload/02/ekonomi/arsredovisningeng.pdf
Sweco’s annual report for 2003 indicates that they acquired an engineering consulting firm on behalf of clients including Andritz (Gunns hiree), and that “the environment is our business” - a business from which they plan to increase annual profits by 20%.

The most interesting connection of SWECO to pulp mills seems to be the work they did on the mill in Valdivia Chile - the one that got shut down after killing an entire colony of 6000 rare black necked swans in a RAMSAR listed wetland. Not saying that was their fault, or that it wasn’t, but a company experienced in major fuck-ups seems a good choice to work with Gunns, Forestry Tasmania, Paul Lennon, Steve Kons, etc.

In funnier news (?) a spokesman for Forestry Tasmania has justified plans to plant 1080-laced kangaroo meat about the place as necessary for killing foxes, because foxes are the biggest threat to wildlife, endangered species and ecosystems in Tassie. Funny that, I thought that was FT’s gig.

PS - put comments 3 & 5 together. Kons seems to have quoted Poyry’s employee figures as attributable to SWECO. Maybe his media person got mixed up, but at least everybody’s reading from the same page - it would explain the dumb-out.

mmm and through it goes

http://www.news.com.au/mercury/story/0,22884,21577059-5007221,00.html

I’d have to say that #5 has a point. When there’s an investment of this size in the wind, someone is going to be receiving the money.

Pulp mill suppliers stand to make $1.5 billion out of this deal, and people will do an awful lot for that kind of money.

Poyry would pocket a hefty amount for the sale plus their risk is substantially reduced because their team is represented as ‘consultants’ to Gunns and presumably they are being paid handsomely to sell this mill, and help ‘solve’ all the various problems that might appear. They were probably also paid to help produce the IIS.
Poyry takes all the money and Gunns takes all the risks.

Poyry’s job is to do whatever it takes to close the deal. If there’s a finance problem, Poyry’ll have someone there to help get the money into the buyer’s hands so the deal can proceed. Doesn’t matter whether Gunns can really pay, or whether the mill provides a benefit to Tasmania. What matters is getting that income into the companies involved. After that it’s maintenance contracts and troubleshooting teams, all bread and butter stuff to big engineering groups.

They’ll have been buttering their way to the top from the outset, using whatever means to convince the buyer to go ahead and yes, scale the project up as much as possible.

These are all pretty standard high-level sales behaviours designed to build the deal, keep out the competition and close the sale as quickly as possible. 

Seen in this light, we can start to glimpse what’s going on behind the scenes and why.

SWECO also builds pulp mills so it’d be reasonable to expect them to want either

a) a slice of the $1.4 bn
b) a sweetener from Poyry
c) favoured treatment on some other arrangement

The most likely scenario is a ‘one hand washes the other’ type deal between the companies involved.

While the sales and commercial end of this is probably pretty normal, the failure of the government to protect the communities and businesses of N. Tasmania is incredibly risky. There can be little doubt that such a huge project will detract from tourism, and it wouldn’t take much for tourism to lose more than forestry gains.

The purpose of a planning system is, in part, to help protect existing communities and create a stable and predictable investment environment. Breaching the planning system invites instability and economic losses. It just isn’t smart to do this without comprehensive due diligence. 

Outsourcing such an important and risky decision to a consultancy of unknown connections is the reverse of due diligence, it looks a lot more like desperation.

SWECO AND POYRY WORK IN PARTNERSHIP
http://construction.project.ltu.se/?subpage=/projectweb/426cb4bb9bb5e/LKAB%20MK3.html
Kons (appropriate name) admitted it in parliament.
No wonder they HAD to gag debate.
The mill is now illegal.

Okay, I’m not going mad, typing we have the site

Here’s the link to the site last night pre modification
http://www.swecopic.com/templates/startpage____14370.asp

And here’s the link to their site today
http://www.sweco.se/templates/startpage____1955.asp

(1) crud ! according to an interview i saw on telly (with Llewellyn I think) the taxpayer will indeed be picking up that bill and when he was asked as to whether the taxpayer paid for the R.P.D.C debacle he said he didn’t know ! can you believe that ? why does he hold the position ?
                  d.d.

Shady, a simple explanation for any apparent discrepancy is that one is the website for the parent company Sweco and the other for its subsidiary Sweco Pic.

Tom in post 3: “Steve Kons reckons SWECO employs 3,500 people, but the company’s official website says 1,100.”

Tom Sweco *does* employ 3600 people; it states that quite clearly on THEIR website.  And Sweco Pic employs 1100; it states that quite clearly on THEIR website.

Sorry to disappoint but I don’t see any signs of a conspiracy here.

interesting comment on crikey by Peter Lloyd
                d.d.

Kate, I didn’t say conspiracy, I said spruiking or incompetence, and I think that still stands.
Your point is not unlike saying that Tamar Ridge Wines employs 1700 people in its wine operations, because Gunns, their parent company does.  In reality they probably employ less than a tenth of that.  The contract is with pic, not with the parent.  Using employment numbers of the parent company in the context of trying to indicate the size of the human resource available to the consultant is misleading and incorrect, at best.

The state government (and opposition) appears to have embraced the idea of ‘conflict of interest’ as their main operating paradigm. (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict_of_interest)

Gunns has a conflict of interest in defining community and other impacts of their mill.

Sweco Pic has a conflict of interest in assessing whether or not there should be a mill.

Even the public service has one as they invest in Gunns shares for their superannuation funding.

Unless we get back to removing conflicts of interest, we’re going to be racing to the bottom in more ways than one.

Kate point taken, but it seems very fresh, even when you add content the copyright stays the same as it represents when you set up the site or changed the ‘look’ or framework of the site. Even if a site changes everyday, like a newspaper, The Examiner’s copyright for example is 1997.

Not a conspiracy, but you get to see more clearly the pattern of events and behaviour, and this site has been set up very recently and is updated regularly, and is advertising new jobs, I like the bit about language proficiency.

Getting ready I suppose.

Re: (22)
...the idea of ‘conflict of interest’

Here is one of the key global interest organisations:

Briefing on Finnish Consultancy Firm Jaakko Poyry
By Larry Lohmann
http://www.wrm.org.uy/plantations/material/JP.html

Forest degradation is associated with the activities of loggers, timber consumers, paper companies, and multilateral agencies. Often overlooked is the role of a much lower-profile set of actors: forestry and engineering consultancy firms.

This small group of companies, based largely in Europe, North America, Australia, New Zealand and Japan, produce no wood or paper themselves and are seldom to be found wielding a bulldozer or chainsaw. Their business is merely to help other firms promote, investigate, plan, design and set up pulp and paper mills and logging and plantation operations. Yet these consultancies exercise global clout out of all proportion to their size and numbers. With comfortable links to universities, aid agencies, machinery and paper firms, and government bureaucracies, they have helped blaze trails through the forest world from Tasmania to the arctic tundra.

and [PDF] Represas espFile Format: PDF/Adobe Acrobat - View as HTML
In 1996, Margules Groome Poyry an Australian subsidiary of Jaakko Poyry, ... The Swedish consulting firm, SWECO, has played a key role in promoting ...
http://www.wrm.org.uy/deforestation/dams/texten.pdf

I see that the Leg Co’s are being offered an overseas trip by the State Guvnns.

Am I just a bit cynical for wondering whether there will be any Guvnns boofheads tagging along with them, (!) at taxpayers expense.

Will they drop in to Stockholm?

(!)

The point is that the RPDC assessment was an open process that was accessable to all Tasmanians, but the process is now well hidden from Tasmanian eyes, and the potential for undetected corruption remains.

Guvnns only acknowledgement of the potential for corruption is to say that proof of corruption will not alter their acceptance of, or the validity of a pro-mill assessment decision.

Conspiracy theories they may be, but secret meetings and deals, FoI exemptions, ex pollies on the payroll as lobbyists, and out-sourcing the assessment process serve to raise questions that will not be satisfied by the “trust us, we have Tasmania’s interest at heart” line being peddled by Guvnns.
Passing the assessment process off to Sweco is a major error on the part of the Tas Gov., and a failure of responsibility to the people of Tasmania.

nice one Shady & networker on the page and info links. gracias.

Different place, same song:

‘Some of Victoria’s most senior legal figures have warned that in its haste to start the $763 million dredging project, the Government is in danger of riding roughshod over the proper public examination of environmental risks.

Legal sources have confirmed that Chris Canavan, QC, a top planning lawyer who was to represent the Port of Melbourne Corporation at hearings to start in June has withdrawn because he does not believe the Government’s processes are fair. The Port is driving the project.
...
The ban is spelt out in the terms of reference, which allow just four weeks of public hearings, which critics say will not be sufficient to allow full scrutiny of the 15,000-page supplementary environmental impacts statement.’ - The Age online