A U.S.-based energy company has announced that it is planning a biomass project using genetically modified rice in Cambodia, in a purportedly massive deal about which little information has been made public.
In a statement posted online Thursday, Sino Bioenergy Corp. said it had signed a memorandum of understanding to acquire Sky Energy Holdings Limited for $119.3 million, with the purchase set to take place 90 days after the signing.
According to the statement, Sky Energy Holdings Limited owns 51 percent of another company, Noble Success Limited, which has 20,000 hectares of agricultural land in Cambodia.
It is not known where the land is situated, and both Sky Energy Holdings Limited and Noble Success Limited do not have websites.
“[Noble Success Limited] is cultivating cassava in Cambodia and intends to plant [Sino Bioenergy’s] super rice seeds and to promote our super rice cultivation in Cambodia,” the statement says.
“[Noble Success Limited] will use the by-product feedstock for biomass and estimates that it can produce up to 270,000 tons of biomass feedstock per annum from its cassava plantation in Cambodia.”
According to the statement, Sino Bioenergy’s “super rice” seeds, which are produced in laboratories, “are disease resistant, high yielding genetically improved rice with the transgenic rice grain length increased by 25% over normal rice.”
Sino Bioenergy Corp.’s website claims the company is based in Nevada and is listed on the Berlin stock exchange and the OTC Pink exchange—a speculative trading marketplace with low transparency requirements based in New York.
The website says the company is involved in converting waste into energy in the Asia Pacific region, and lists offices in Ohio, Hong Kong and Shenzhen, China.
The company’s listed phone number in Hong Kong connected to a person who declined to give her name, but said, “Sino Bioenergy is using our registered address. This is not their office.”
