Jim Ratcliffe warns EU bureaucracy will drive away industry’s investments

Petrochemicals billionaire Sir Jim Ratcliffe has blamed Europe’s “suffocating bureaucracy” and environmental red tape for pushing companies to invest outside the bloc, admitting that he would not have agreed on a landmark €4bn investment in Belgium if he had known of the regulatory roadblocks in advance.

The European Commission’s Green Deal, an ambitious push to decarbonise the EU, needed to also take into account the importance of supporting industry, Ratcliffe told the Financial Times, warning of the rising backlash from businesses towards Brussels’ “uncompetitive” policies.

“You’re going to go to America or China or the Middle East to build new capacity if it’s this difficult in Europe,” said Ratcliffe, chief executive of petrochemicals group Ineos, who has just completed a deal to buy a 27 per cent stake in UK’s Manchester United football team.

Europe’s falling business competitiveness relative to the US, China and other rivals has become a critical issue for the continent’s biggest industries, prompting major political debate inside the EU on how to protect its single market while also maintaining world-leading environmental transition targets.

European governments are fearful that they cannot compete with the financial muscle of US President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, which provides $369bn in green subsidies aimed at boosting the rollout of clean energy technologies, or the low-cost, high-demand Chinese market.

Ratcliffe’s comments echo a threat by US oil and gas company ExxonMobil that it could withhold billions of dollars in climate-related investments from Europe unless Brussels cuts the regulatory burden around decarbonisation.

“I don’t think anybody’s objecting to the Green Deal,” said Ratcliffe, but added that Brussels should not see the route to decarbonisation through deindustrialisation.

“[Commission president Ursula von der Leyen] needs to look after industry and get industry going in the right direction. Don’t make it so uncompetitive that she shuts it all down,” he added.

“The manufacturing industry in Europe has been in decline for the last 10 years relative to its primary competitors, which are America and China. We’ve been losing ground against those two. And that’s not the way to decarbonise.”

Ineos, which was founded in 1998 with a petrochemical operation in Antwerp, announced four years ago that it would spend €4bn to build a new production plant outside the Belgian port city. Project One would be the largest of its kind in Europe for more than two decades.

But the project has been mired in permitting issues, legal challenges and regulatory wrangles. Fifteen NGOs launched a new legal case this week seeking to overturn the reinstatement of necessary construction permits that have been repeatedly granted and withdrawn, citing the planned site’s impact on the environment.

“Permitting has been unfortunately a nightmare . . . clearly that doesn’t encourage other people to invest in Europe,” said Ratcliffe of the delays. “We wouldn’t do that project again if we knew that we had that risk that they could take away the permits.”

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