Mandelson blamed for death of Anglesey firm

LORD MANDELSON may have hastened the demise of Anglesey Aluminium by aiding the firm’s Russian competitors while an EU trade commissioner, the Conservatives said last night. Smelting came to an end at Anglesey Aluminium last year, leaving 390 people out of work – despite a last-ditch offer of ?48m in aid from the Wales Office. The company, owned by multi-national Rio Tinto, had relied on electricity from the nearby Wylfa nuclear power station, but the deal came to an end as Wylfa prepared for decommissioning. Yesterday the Conservatives raised questions about a 2007 Brussels decision to cut duties imposed on raw aluminium imported into the EU from 6% to 3%. Lord Mandelson was EU trade commissioner at the time, and the change was estimated to have saved Russian giant Rusal around ?117m per year. He attracted controversy a year later by visiting Rusal owner Oleg Deripaska on the Russian magnate’s yacht. David Jones, the Clwyd West MP and Shadow Wales Minister, said: “The lack of reliably-priced electricity was the principal cause of Anglesey Aluminium’s demise, but the 2007 duty decision put further pressure on them at the worst possible time.” Asked about Lord Mandelson’s role during Welsh Questions in the Commons yesterday, Wales Office Minister Wayne David said: “I do not believe that it was a factor in any way at all, because the aluminium industry throughout the world has faced difficulties. “We are of the view that working closely with our European partners is entirely positive, and that is recognised by Rio Tinto, for example, which is an international player.” He added: “We live in an international community, and the European Union is a big and positive player.” There was frustration in the Wales Office last year that efforts to muster an aid package worth ?48m and face-to-face meetings between ministers and bosses failed to save the jobs. The firm, which began production on Anglesey 40 years ago, said the Government offer was insufficient for it to “break even”. Yesterday Ynys M?n MP Albert Owen said the job losses had left “a massive hole in the regional economy of North West Wales”, and said keeping jobs on the island where possible should be a “priority” for the Government. The exchanges at Welsh Questions – one of the final sessions before a general election – were dominated by arguments over the economy. Shadow Welsh Secretary Cheryl Gillan said the number of people economically inactive in Wales – 429,000 – was 100,000 more than the entire population of Cardiff. “In the past year, the number of long-term unemployed has more than doubled. Welsh gross value added has gone backwards compared with the rest of the UK, and Wales is the poorest part of the country,” she said. “This startling level of worklessness is tearing apart the social fabric of Wales, which is bearing the brunt of rising unemployment across the United Kingdom.” But Welsh Secretary Peter Hain said: “The difference between this, the deepest recession that Britain has faced in generations, and the much lighter recessions that the Tory governments completely failed to deal with in the 1980s and 1990s in Wales is that people are now being helped out of difficulty and the economy is starting to recover. “It is recovering much more quickly than people expected, and much more quickly than the doom merchants on the Conservative benches have been saying it would.”