Granby will join the ranks of the Quebec battery industry on Tuesday with the formalization of the Volta Canada Energy Solutions plant project, La Presse was able to confirm. Quebec and Ottawa will financially support a company established in Luxembourg – a country known for its advantageous taxation for businesses.
It was not possible to obtain the details of this financial package estimated at several hundred million dollars. These details will be revealed by Prime Minister François Legault, the Minister of Economy, Innovation and Energy, Pierre Fitzgibbon, and the federal Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry, François- Philippe Champagne, at a press conference.
In Granby, Volta Canada Energy Solutions will produce copper sheets. These go into making the anode, the negative pole of the lithium-ion battery found in electric cars. The company is owned by Volta Energy Solutions, domiciled in Luxembourg, according to the Registraire des entreprises du Québec.
This project is not a surprise in itself.
Since March 31, 2022, Solus Advanced Materials, a South Korean group to which Volta belongs, has owned the former Circuit Foil Luxembourg plant. The multinational had paid 81 million to get its hands on the land and the building, located in the industrial park of Granby, whose floor area is 90,000 square feet.
Last May, as part of an economic mission to Asia, Mr. Champagne notably met with the senior management of Solus in South Korea. On X (formerly Twitter), he implied that the establishment of the group in Canada was only a formality.
“We discussed how we can continue to develop this market [Canada] together, because Canada is a reliable, stable and secure partner,” the minister said, in the message that accompanied a photo showing him with senior management. of Solus.
Mr. Fitzgibbon also mentioned the copper sheet project in Granby last year during an editorial meeting with La Presse. At the time, the minister suggested that the project could represent a total investment of between 200 and 300 million. According to financial documents from the promoters, we are counting on at least two production sites. Volta therefore seems to be counting on an expansion of the existing industrial footprint in Granby.
Operation ceased in 2005 at Circuit Foil Luxembourg. Limited activities had remained until 2014. The Quebec State had injected 104 million into the adventure between 1999 and 2003. The factory produced copper sheets for the printed circuit board market.
Volta Canada will be the most recent company to obtain financial support as part of a project surrounding the battery sector for electric vehicles. On August 17, Ford received a total of $640 million in aid from the Legault and Trudeau governments to build a cathode materials plant – the main component of the lithium-ion battery – in Bécancour.
By October, Northvolt should lift the veil on a 7 billion investment for a cell complex, the last step before battery assembly, on the South Shore of Montreal. La Presse has already revealed the details of what will be the largest private industrial project in Quebec.
Luxembourg is one of the countries that is often singled out because of the tax climate that allows large companies to reduce their tax bills. Since 2002, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has identified around twenty “offshore financial centers”. These included Switzerland, Luxembourg, the United Kingdom and Ireland, among others. The IMF stopped publishing this list in 2008.
Since 2000, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has identified around 20 “uncooperative tax havens”. In 2023, no jurisdiction is officially identified by the OECD as an “uncooperative tax haven”.
