People: French prepares wind float and PLUS blueprint

Seasoned small company player John French, who used to chair the PLUS Markets advisory panel, has his own urgent strategy for lifting the market out of its doldrums, as he prepares for the eventual float of novel wind power venture EWF Energy Group with a £1 million to £1.5 million fundraising. To restore its credibility as a market to raise new money, French insists that PLUS must ‘cut the number of advisers’ by pruning the weaker brethren, introduce a price tariff so that practitioners can stop cutting each others’ throats and make some decent money, and stick to its core PLUS-quoted market, divorced from its profitless ‘parallel platforms’ trading fully listed and AIM-quoted securities.

PLUS Markets Group, the AIM-quoted company that operates PLUS and lost a reduced £5.7 million in 2010, has ‘cash for two years’, contends French, who argues that the survival and development of PLUS-quoted could be crucial for industry. ‘PLUS-quoted is the only platform for small companies, or they would fall into the clutches of the venture capitalists.’

One company with a promising future, according to French, is EWF Energy, which he chairs. French and a group of investors bought the intellectual property and have raised £200,000 privately for the company, which has developed a ‘doughnut-like’ wind tower with Belgian technology, which he says has been tested for three to four years and can harness much lighter winds than most wind power systems need and create ‘clean electricity’.

French, who also heads AIM-quoted Resources In Insurance Group among many corporate involvements, sees EWF as supplying wind towers at around £500,000 apiece to hospitals, schools, factories and sports stadia. He suggests buyers would obtain payback within three years.

A demonstration tower in Belgium, followed by another in the UK, accompanied with another £500,000 funding, could then provide the backdrop for a float on PLUS-quoted – provided it has learnt its lessons.