The Doicești site is not just a plot of land, it includes 50 greened hectares, after the complete demolition of the former coal-fired power plant, a completely new 110/20 kV transformer station, with a book value of 12 million euros, a connection capacity to the National Energy System of approximately 600 MW, as well as other assets, informs Nova Power&Gas (NPG).
Following information published in the public domain, the company stated that “the transaction between RoPower Nuclear and Nova Power & Gas, concluded on June 5, 2025, was carried out based on the RoPower Nuclear offer, at the price of 24,344,314 euros, the lowest of the available market valuations. The transaction can be reversed at the request of RoPower Nuclear, based on the 3 notifications sent by Nova, valid until October 1, 2026 inclusively”.
Also, distinct from the site that was the subject of the sale, Nova Power & Gas performed works and incurred costs related to the project, amounting to 19,491,938 euros excluding VAT. These were not paid by RoPower Nuclear, and their equivalent was proposed by NPG, including to enter the share capital of the project company, NPG informed.
According to the cited source, the post-transaction valuation of the site owned by RoPower Nuclear in Doicești, carried out for the project company with reference to June 30, 2025, indicates a market value of 63.5 million euros on average. The loans granted by Nuclearelectrica to the project company RoPower Nuclear are commercial loans, with an interest rate of 12% per year in euros, guaranteed by the assets acquired by RoPower Nuclear, as well as other assets or rights, NPG specified. Nova Power & Gas proposed to participate in the financing of the project company through loans granted to it but the proposal was not agreed.
NPG also emphasizes that the selection of the site in Doicești was carried out exclusively by Nuclearelectrica. The site has been validated over the years by numerous studies of the agency and was also the subject of an evaluation mission of the International Atomic Energy Agency, carried out in April 2024, with a positive result.
Nova Power & Gas believes that the project could be continued in several scenarios. One of them aims to continue the project with the NuScale technology, under the conditions of obtaining regional rights for Romania, of staggered payments including after the plant is put into operation and of a mandatory percentage of works allocated to Romanian companies. These rights are based on the status of a first-of-a-kind project.
Another scenario would be to put the project on hold for a period of time, until the costs of the SMR technology decrease or until non-refundable financing for nuclear projects is obtained.
A third scenario would involve using the Doicești site also in the technology change scenario.
Nova Power & Gas also presented the supporting documents in support of the claims: the offer to acquire the site by RoPower Nuclear, the 3 notifications regarding the right to reverse the transaction, the post-transaction evaluation of the site, financing proposals through shareholder loans and the film presenting the evolution of the Doicești site.
According to a press release from the National Nuclearelectrica Company (SNN), sent to the Bucharest Stock Exchange, the Extraordinary General Meeting of Shareholders approved, on Friday, the publication of the report of the Prime Minister’s Control Body.
According to the document, the cost estimate of the Doicești SMR project at December 2025 was $6.5 billion, approximately $3.8 billion more than the initial estimate.
Also, the process of designating the SNN associate in the Project Company association, namely Nova Power&Gas, and the method of establishing and operating the project company (RPN) were carried out in the absence of an association procedure approved at the SNN level and without a prior assessment of compliance with European norms regulating public intervention in the economy, and this association was analyzed post factum, after almost 2 years from the establishment of the project company, by a company specialized in evaluating such operations by reporting to rules regarding state intervention in the economy.
The control body also concluded that the approach that ended with the association decision was not based on a comparative assessment of potential private entities, carried out on the basis of quantifiable criteria, through which the private partner should have proven its financial, technical, technological and risk-taking capacity of the project company’s activity in the same report in which it would have shared, after the association, decision-making control and results.
“The motivation regarding the quality of sole investor, by virtue of the quality of owner of the land, cannot be supported since the conduct of the private partner was one that resulted in the sale of the land and the additional re-invoicing of the works carried out on the respective site and not the contribution in kind to the capital of the project company. The provisions of the Investors Agreement, which is the basis of the association between SNN and NPG and which even prevails over the constitutive act of the project company, do not provide symmetrical rights and obligations to the two shareholders during the operation of the project company and the implementation of the project, so that the shareholders’ risks are also distributed disproportionately, to the detriment of SNN. The participation of the private partner in the project was secured by the Investors Agreement and it does not have a right to withdraw from the association and to capitalize on the credit held in the project company, to the extent established for the benefit of NPG. The disproportion of the distribution of risks, through the asymmetrical distribution of some of the rights and obligations, is not also finds in terms of the general decision-making control of the activity which, according to the clauses of the Investors Agreement and those of the Articles of Association, are perfectly balanced. The decision-making balance is manifested through the decision-making method established by the attributions of the AGM, the Board of Directors and the General Manager, according to which SNN cannot decide on the activity of the project company in any aspect, in the absence of the support of the decisions by the private shareholder”, explains the cited source.
The document also shows that, prior to the completion of the transaction through which the project company acquired the site, the limits of the powers to conclude and approve contracts were modified, so that the minimum limit from which the EGMS had to approve a contract was raised from more than 5 million euros to over 50 million euros, and the approval of contracts between 20 million euros and 50 million euros (inclusive) was provided for in the competence of the Board of Directors, while the competence to approve contracts with a value of up to 20 million euros was assigned to the General Manager.
“This created, with the vote of the SNN representative in the general meeting of shareholders and even at the initiative of the public enterprise, a conventional framework through which the SNN representative, mandated in the RPN (RoPower Nuclear project company n.r) and the one designated in the Board of Directors would not formally assume responsibility for approving the operations related to the site acquisition transaction”, point out the representatives of the Control Body.
They also draw attention to the fact that, in the context of the existence of evaluation reports and studies that indicated extremely different values of the Doicești site, although the RoPower Nuclear constitutive act provided for the right of any shareholder to request or directly carry out an audit/review under conditions of unrestricted access to the spaces and documents related to the project company’s activity, SNN did not take any steps to clarify the differences between the market values of the site presented in the respective evaluation reports.
Also, the amendment of the Investors Agreement and the execution of the transaction, through the simultaneous conclusion of a sales contract and a re-invoicing agreement, constituted an attempt to create the appearance that the acquisition of the site was a transaction that complied with market rules, but the transaction, in the context of the re-invoicing of costs, is contrary to any operations that two independent entities would have accepted under free market conditions. The re-invoicing agreement resulted in the buyer assuming the payment of an amount significantly exceeding the market price.
The report also indicates that no system for monitoring RPN expenses was identified at SNN, in particular those made from the shareholder credit of the public enterprise, in the context in which, according to the decisions of the General Assembly of Shareholders of the project company, adopted with the approval of the financing ceilings granted by SNN, it was foreseen to delegate to the executive management the performance of “certain or all operational activities”.
In this context, among the recommendations made by the Control Body of the Ministry of Energy is the analysis of the steps that resulted in the decision to associate SNN with NPG and the development of this association from the perspective of reporting to the European and national norms that regulate state intervention in the economy, respectively of the way of framing the association in market conditions, in order to eliminate the risk that it will subsequently be invalidated by the competent authority in the field, which was not notified in advance.