Petrofac is facing a legal battle over claims it has withheld hundreds of thousands of pounds in bonus payments from workers on its gas plant in Shetland.
Contractors on the £800million Laggan-Tormore plant claim the oil and gas services giant has repeatedly fobbed off attempts to pay out bonuses worth up to £250,000.
Tavish Scott, the Scottish Liberal Democrats’ Shetland candidate, weighed into the row, labelling the situation “unacceptable” and demanded that Petrofac pay the bonuses.
An Aberdeen hotel was included in a £130million portfolio of 10 UK hospitality properties that was put up for sale yesterday.
But potential suitors could be put off at a time when room revenues in the north-east market are plummeting.
The Hotel Collection, a group of properties owned by Dallas-based private equity firm Lone Star, has instructed Savills and Rothschild to find buyers for the portfolio, which notched revenues of £48million last year.
London’s top flight index slid into the red yesterday after it succumbed to market jitters ahead of a meeting between oil suppliers over a potential production freeze.
GEV Group’s anti-corrosion coatings business has set up shop in Aberdeen.
Oxifree UK will initially employ four to five people at its rented premises near Aberdeen Harbour.
The facility will also be used as a training facility for technicians, while GEV’s other subsidiaries – GEV Offshore, GEV Windpower and Subsea Masters – will have a presence at the site.
A nosedive in spending at cash-strapped oil and gas companies has inflicted an 82% drop in profits at Peterhead’s Score Group.
Profits also took a tumble at Kintore-based Ferguson Group, which supplies offshore accommodation modules and containers for the international energy industry
Score chairman Charles Ritchie said the global engineering firm had an “overhead structure” designed to cater for revenue streams in excess of £200million.
The boss of a newly formed group of three businesses has vowed to come to the rescue of North Sea oil and gas companies with badly-needed well intervention services.
Paul Landers said The New Way (TNW) will pool its resources to improve flow from wells at a low cost and with a quick turnaround time.
TNW is made up of well services firm StimLite and GB Seismic, both based in Leicester, and UCS, a contracting supply company.
Oil experts from industry and academia will debate the obstacles to extracting the North Sea’s remaining reserves at a conference in Aberdeen this week.
The list of speakers includes top petroleum economist Professor Alex Kemp, Shell’s UK director for upstream, Paul Goodfellow and Amec Foster Wheeler’s group president for northern Europe and Commonwealth of Independent States, John Pearson.
The event, organised by Aberdeen University, will take place at the King’s Conference Centre on Thursday.
The boss at Saltire Energy said yesterday the Aberdeenshire oil service firm had handled low crude prices “extremely well” despite a double-digit drop in profits.
The Portlethen-based oil drilling equipment rental business ended its last financial year with pre-tax profits of £15.28million, down 13.6% on 2013/14, according to accounts lodged at Companies House.
Turnover at Saltire, which is controlled by award-winning entrepreneur Mike Loggie, fell 11.9% to £31.98million for the year ended June 30, 2015.
Wildlife lover and businessman Ian Marchant will swing his way Tarzan-like into the president’s chair at the Royal Zoological Society of Scotland next month.
The zoological society, which owns Edinburgh Zoo and the Highland Wildlife Park near Aviemore, said Mr Marchant was a longstanding member and strong supporter of conservation.
The new role is in addition to the posts Mr Marchant holds at several businesses and charities.
Industry body Oil and Gas UK (OGUK) yesterday urged the next Scottish Government to make a quartet of commitments to help energy companies steer a course out of the downturn.
OGUK said the government needs to create a supportive business environment, delivery world-class infrastructure and connectivity, help innovation flourish and support skills retention.
New product launches and demand from the Middle East have combined to help oil and gas consultancy Kelton Engineering lift its profits by nearly 90%.
The Aberdeen-headquartered engineering consultancy said UK trading had held reasonably firm in the year ended September 30, 2015, a period which saw Brent crude prices fall from just under $100 a barrel to about $50.
But bosses at Kelton expect the industry downturn to have a greater impact on income during the current financial year.
Energy service group Petrofac is investigating bribery allegations against one of its former directors.
The firm took the step after leaked documents were brought to its attention indicating that Peter Warner had authorised “confidential payments” worth £1.4million to win a contract in Kuwait.
The documents include an email exchange in 2007 appearing to show Mr Warner, who was Petrofac’s executive vice-president of sales and marketing, requesting payments using a code which substituted the word “millions” for “metres”.
Scottish colleges have been invited to bid for a share of the £12million pot Nicola Sturgeon pledged for retraining out-of-work oil and gas engineers.
Skills Development Scotland (SDS) said the current funding round is the first it has launched using cash from the Oil and Gas Transition Training Fund.
The overall value of the first tranche has not been fixed and will depend on the volume and viability of the bids received.
Maxwell Drummond International (MDI) has gone bust, putting nine people out of work at its Aberdeen office.
MDI, an executive recruitment consultancy to the global energy sector, was placed into provisional liquidation last week.
A spokeswoman for insolvency specialist Begbies Traynor said the "business failure" of MDI was "partly as a result of the downturn in the oil industry".
A Scottish research partnership said yesterday it had taken the biggest cut of a £4million fund created to help lower emissions in the UK.
Scottish Carbon Capture and Storage (SCCS) won a £2.8million share of the money on offer from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC).
SCCS, a tie-up between Aberdeen, Edinburgh, Heriot-Watt and Strathclyde universities and the British Geological Survey, will put the money towards three projects aimed at developing cost-effective carbon capture technologies.
Green power is meeting more than half of Scottish electricity demand for the first time, new figures show.
Scottish politicians and green groups hailed the figure, but warned further progress would be hindered by UK Government policy.
A total of 57.7% of electricity consumed was generated by renewable technologies in Scotland last year, up 7.9 percentage points on 2014, according to provisional statistics published yesterday by the Department of Energy and Climate Change (Decc).
Oil and gas businesses have gone from being technology pioneers to risk-averse Luddites, an industry chief said yesterday.
Colette Cohen, a vice-president at Centrica, said aerospace was the only industry on the same level as oil and gas 40 years ago.
The sector has a proud history of innovation, but the biggest breakthroughs have tended to come when oil prices were low.
The developer of a controversial wind farm off the coast of Aberdeen has dismissed claims it will not be able to fund the £230million project.
Swedish energy firm Vattenfall said it is confident that cash reserves are in place for the European Offshore Wind Deployment Centre (EOWDC) testing and demonstration site, although an investment decision has yet to be taken on the scheme.
Assurances came after Vattenfall announced the next step in the project. It said offshore survey group Fugro has started assessing the seabed in Aberdeen Bay ahead of the construction stage, which is slated to start in late 2017.
Offshore survey group Fugro has started assessing the seabed in Aberdeen bay ahead of the construction stage of a £230million wind farm project.
Aberdeen Offshore Wind Farm Limited (AOWFL), the joint venture company behind the project, said the information gathered would help it design the foundations for the 11-turbine scheme.
While an investment decision on the European Offshore Wind Deployment Centre (EOWDC) has yet to be taken, building work is slated to start in late 2017 ahead of first power in 2018, according to AOWFL.
US oilman Stephen Remp said yesterday he was “deeply saddened” by the plight of SeaEnergy, the troubled north-east firm he used to lead.
He was speaking after the Westhill-based energy service company announced plans to sell its 3D visualisation business, a move that sent its shares tumbling 45%.
SeaEnergy said it was already in talks with a number of potential buyers for Return to Scene (R2S), which it bought for £5million in 2012.
The oil price rout forced Hunting to lay off “just under 100 workers” in the north-east of Scotland last year, the energy service firm said yesterday.
Hunting reduced its global headcount by 30% to 2,784 in 2015 as part of cost-cutting measures which were brought in amid a severe slump in drilling activity.
Chief executive Dennis Proctor said the outlook for the industry was “bleak”, adding: “We are in a wilderness without a single path to guide us.”
Aberdeen entrepreneurs need to show a sense of urgency and passion if they want to make exporting work for their companies, local businessmen said yesterday.
Peter Moon, an account manager at oil and gas software firm Tracker, which has only been in the export market for a year, said he wished the firm had gotten in on the act earlier.
Mr Moon, whose company is targeting Middle Eastern clients, said: “We’ve taken a target-driven approach to exporting. Exporting seems a long way off to some people. You can make a two to three year programme but if you think like that, then in two years you will still just be talking about exporting.
A renewable-energy fund and an infrastructure firm yesterday committed to spend £9.8million on buying and upgrading the district heating scheme in Wick.
The UK Green Investment Bank (GIB) and Equitix said they would improve the infrastructure at the Wick green-energy plant and expand the heating system to cover another 150 customers.
They announced their plans after agreeing to buy the company that had owned and operated the scheme, Ignis Biomass, from Jersey-based fund Ludgate Environmental.
Dulas has started building two new Scottish hydroelectric schemes which will help the country meet its climate change targets, the green-energy developer said yesterday.
Both schemes will also help cut energy-costs on the rural estates where they are based and generate income through the feed-in tariff (FiT) system, Dulas said.
The Scottish Government has set a target of enabling renewable power generators to cover 100% of the country’s energy demands by 2020.
