Kedco raises more than £400,000 in fundraising round

Waste to energy company Kedco, which is based in the UK and Ireland, has secured about £403,000 (€485,000) through a placing of 31 million shares at an issue price of £0.013 per share.

The money raised is to be put towards working capital and will be invested into the company’s biomass electricity and heat generation projects.

The company has selected more than 8.8 million new ordinary shares at the price of £0.01775 per share to add to its shareholder Farmer Business Developments (FBD) as a result of FBD exercising its right of conversion under its February 2011 €1.2 million 10% convertible loan note.

Last month the Kedco said it had formed an agreement with Newry Biomass and Ulster Bank,  a subsidiary of the Royal Bank of Scotland, and Newry has now initiated its first drawdown under this deal. Kedco is now about to finance the rest of the Newry plant.

Once the plant is up and running it is expected to sell about 29 million KWh of electricity to the grid in Northern Ireland each year. The facility is expected to make EBITDA of about £1.9 million per annum as well.

Because of this new share, the total value of voting rights will increase to more than 295 million shareholders from Thursday.

Gerry Madden, CEO of Kedco, says: ‘Despite the challenging economic environment, the board is encouraged by the increasing level of financial support given to our business through debt and equity. The backing from Ulster Bank, in addition to the new and existing equity investors, enables us to continue to advance our other projects as we progress towards initial commissioning of the first 2MW capacity of our plant in Newry by Q2 2012.’