A Danish-owned company has signed a 1.2 billion dollar contract to build a hydrogen power plant in the small South American country of Suriname.
But the businessmen in front have no experience with green energy, the companies they claim as partners have never heard of them, and experts call the whole undertaking “dodgy” and “strange”.
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In March 2021, the Danish-owned company HPSG (Hybrid Power System Group) announced that it will invest 1.2 billion dollars in building a hydrogen power plant that will revolutionize the green energy transition in the South American country of Suriname.
The 100-megawatt plant will generate electricity from wind and solar power and store excess energy as hydrogen, which can power the grid when the wind is weak or the sky is dark. In addition, the plant will export hydrogen and oxygen and deliver millions of litres of clean drinking water to the Surinamese people.
HPSG anticipates that construction of this cutting-edge power plant will be completed in just two years, in 2023, creating 600 direct – and 2000 indirect – jobs in a country with a population of less than 600,000 inhabitants.
HPSG plans to finance the power plant through loans from “investment banks which specialize in investing in emerging markets”. The agreement will allegedly not cost Suriname a dime and the small South American country has only committed to purchasing the electricity generated by the plant through a Power Purchase Agreement.
“The world has been ready for Suriname. And now Suriname is ready for the world,” proclaimed Benny Falk, CEO of HPSG, at the press conference in March 2021.
The agreement would help profile Suriname as a green superpower at the COP26 conference currently underway.
“In the years during and after the COP26 meeting in Glasgow, we will be a showcase,” said Albert Ramdin, Suriname’s minister of foreign affairs, sitting left of the Danish investors at the press conference.
“Do not underestimate this. It is almost a Silicon Valley we are bringing here in my opinion,” said Armand Achaibersing, Suriname’s minister of finance, also attending the press conference.
No new information about this revolutionary power plant has been disclosed at the climate summit, however, and a long investigation published by Danwatch and Ekstra Bladet now reveals that something isn’t right behind the green facade.
HPSG’s purported partners say they have no relationship with HPSG, and that HPSG is exploiting their name.
The company’s top executives have no documented experience in the field of sustainable energy. What they do have is a long history of bankruptcies and murky business dealings.
Furthermore, the ownership of HPSG is obscured by a tangled web of companies spanning several continents and ending on a Greek resort island.
Experts in fraud and financial crime say that the whole situation “looks very dodgy”, and they have doubts that HPSG is a “legitimate business”.
But in interviews with Danwatch and Ekstra Bladet, the company’s leadership insists that “everything is by the book”.
HPSG claims that the company is led “by a Danish management with specialists in all fields of green energy.” But behind the green facade stand a cast of characters from the Danish business world who have no documented experience building green power plants.
Jesper Nielsen, the founder of HSPG, was by his own account trained as a shipbuilder, but over the last eleven years he has founded or managed fourteen different companies that have ended in bankruptcy or involuntary dissolution, mostly in the construction and real estate industries.
HPSG’s CEO, Benny Falk, describes himself as an architect. He trained as a mason and a massage therapist, but is perhaps best known for his participation in the survivalist reality programme The Robinson Expedition in 2001.
In the decade that followed, he was associated with a series of construction and real estate ventures that ended in bankruptcy. A court verdict obtained by Danwatch and Ekstra Bladet reveals that he was arrested in Copenhagen Airport in 2010 when arriving from Uganda with twelve uncut raw diamonds, commonly known as blood diamonds, valued at approximately $53.000 (DKK 345.000). He was sentenced to a fine of $13.200 (DKK 86.000) in 2013.
In addition, Benny Falk is the owner of a medical cannabis company in Portugal, and he has formerly established an English company, which was half-owned by another company on Isle of Man, a well-known tax haven.
Our investigation also reveals what appears to be business connections between Benny Falk and Klaus Garde Nielsen, dubbed “Denmark’s King of Bankruptcies”, a notorious Danish businessman who has been sentenced to multiple jail sentences, convicted of fraud, pimping and other crimes.
In interviews with Danwatch and Ekstra Bladet, Benny Falk admits that he knows Klaus Garde Nielsen, but he denies having any business relations with him. Klaus Garde Nielsen refused to comment on his relation with Benny Falk.
The people surrounding Jesper Nielsen and Benny Falk have no experience with green energy either. HPSG’s chief operating officer, Michael Lumby, founded the medical cannabis company Cibid Group ApS, while the company’s press officer, Niels Jørgen Langkilde, was until recently listed on Cibid Group’s website as its communications advisor.
Langkilde is a former member of the Danish parliament from the Conservatives and he is the current national chairman of Patientforeningen, the largest Danish advocacy organisation for patient rights.
HPSG’s co-founder and investor, Jesper Carvalho Andersen, is the former managing director of Scandinavian operations for Inditex, a clothing retailer that counts Zara among its holdings.
COO Michael Lumby denies that the team’s lack of experience is a problem.
“Our advantage is that we are adaptable. I’d say it’s harder to build a pharmaceutical factory than an energy park,” he tells Danwatch and Ekstra Bladet, referring to his experience in the medical cannabis industry.
On its website, HPSG names nine prominent Danish and international companies as its partners in building the green energy park, but many of these companies deny that they are working with HPSG in interviews with Danwatch and Ekstra Bladet.
HPSG says it has “developed an innovative hybrid energy solution over six years with globally leading technological partners, such as ABB, Deif and Deutz.”
None of these companies have heard of HPSG.
”We have investigated the matter internally and we don’t have any relations with a company called HPSG. They are exploiting our name and we will contact the company to demand that they remove our name from their website,” said Christian Ludwig, senior vice president of communication at the German company Deutz.
We received similar responses from Danish companies DEIF and Transform Rootzone, the Swiss company ABB, and Mingyang Wind Power in China, all of which are named by HPSG as important partners.
Three more companies claimed by HPSG as partners in the Suriname project did not respond to requests for comment by Danwatch and Ekstra Bladet.
HPSG’s CEO Benny Falk calls the company “a Danish knowhow centre that has been developing this system for the past seven years”.
But even the ownership of the company is obscured by a complicated tangle of companies. On its LinkedIn profile, HPSG claims to have divisions in Denmark, Portugal and Thailand.
We have also identified HPSG companies in Colombia and Ghana. Benny Falk is listed as CEO of HPSG’s local company in Suriname, but the owner of HPSG Suriname is not identified in company documents acquired by Danwatch and Ekstra Bladet.
Jesper Nielsen is also the director of a Danish company called HPSG Help ApS located in the small provincial town of Hobro. The company is founded by his daughter Amanda Nielsen, who according to her Instagram is a “happy spiritual soul” and performs at music events under the alias DJ Chackra. Although evidence suggests otherwise, Jesper Nielsen denies that this company has anything to do with Hybrid Power System Group and says its main purpose is to build websites. Amanda Nielsen did not reply to our request for comments.
But the main HPSG company is incorporated in the Netherlands, also by Jesper Nielsen. According to the Dutch Chamber of Commerce, HPSG is owned by a real estate company called Sales Group Development, which is located on the Greek island of Rhodos.
According to Greek documents obtained by Danwatch and Ekstra Bladet, Jesper Nielsen is the sole owner of this company, which was established in 2005. No financial statements have seemingly been filed for Sales Group Development, however, and the company appears to be inactive, even though it has not been deregistered.
According to Jakob Dedenroth Bernhoft, a partner in the firm Fraud React, the structure of the company looks suspicious.
“It is basically strange why the ownership of the companies in Holland should be located in Greece, when the business does not seem to have any apparent connections there,” says Bernhoft.
“This means it is difficult to ascertain who really owns these companies or where the money is going,” he adds.
In his opinion, the whole HPSG project seems strange.
“It would be rather surprising if they can deliver a project worth over a billion dollars in a field they don’t seem to have had any prior experience with,” Bernhoft says.
“And then you have the references to partnerships that are untrue, so the whole thing looks very odd.”
Tom Kirchmaier, a professor and researcher at Copenhagen Business School and the London School of Economics with expertise in financial crime, takes a similar view.
“It looks very dodgy. I would say that the probability of this being a legitimate business is very low,” he says.
HPSG’s CEO, Benny Falk, denies that there is anything dodgy about the project in Suriname, with the structure of the company, or the purported business partners in the project that have never heard of HPSG. According to Falk, “everything is by the book”.
“All I can say is we have an agreement, and I can’t be held responsible for what they say,” says Falk, explaining that the companies are unable to comment on their partnerships with HPSG because of the existence of non-disclosure agreements.
During the interview, Benny Falk promised to provide documentation for these partnership agreements, but two weeks later, Danwatch and Ekstra Bladet still haven’t received any documentation.
Jesper Nielsen, the company’s founder, explains things somewhat differently. According to him, it is not unusual to list companies as partners on the basis of familiarity with their brand.
“There are no companies referred to on the website that I don’t know. I definitely know who they are,” says Nielsen.
When confronted with Deutz’s statement that HPSG is exploiting their name, his explanation changes.
“Deutz isn’t there [on the website] at all, so I don’t know where you’re getting that from,” says Nielsen.
But it appears on your website in several places.
“It’s called Lissai Deutsch, if you want the real name. It isn’t Deutz,” he replies.
It was not possible for us to identify a company with a name resembling “Lissai Deutsch”.
Danwatch and Ekstra Bladet asked for follow-up comments from the alleged partner companies. At the time of publishing ABB, DEIF, Deutz and Transform Rootzone all reiterated that they have no agreements in any form with HPSG.
To see HPSG’s answers to all our findings, read the full investigation in Danish here.
Meanwhile in Suriname, scepticism is growing around HPSG and its 1.2 billion dollar project.
“Since the signing [of the agreements], no reports have been received [by the government], whereas this should have been done regularly,” says Flip de Vries, honorary Danish consul in Suriname, after discussions with a senior official in the Surinamese government.
In October, Chan Santokhi, Suriname’s president, chose to comment on the case.
“The agreement states, among other things, that if HPSG does not perform, the government will come with a penalty,” said Santokhi. “So they are busy, and we will continue to monitor.”
Since the publishing of this investigation, HPSG has deleted all content on its two websites referring to the alleged partner companies.
