Opinions
Cynical souls might form an opinion that BBW is actually doing something worse than that - betraying the company's professed raison d'être and flogging off its best assets to fund a dubious share buyback.
But BBW is a Babcock and Brown satellite, so one shouldn't expect too much.
BNB only owns 11% of BBW but it takes the fees, provides all the management and, at least until the AGM on November 26, the chairman as well.
This morning BBW and BNB announced they were selling their 50/50 Portuguese wind farm joint venture to a Portuguese private equiteer Magnum Capital for $2.23 billion.
A year after BBW bought its half from parent BNB, BBW is recording a loss of $11.7 million while BNB is claiming a small but undisclosed surplus over book value.
But that's not really the point of this transaction. Everyone knows why BNB is selling - it rather desperately needs money to pay down debt. The Portuguese wind farms are only a part of BNB garage sale, albeit the best part.
For BBW, the wind farms are the business.
BBW continues to stress that it has no problems with debt, that all is hunky dory in wind farm land and the future of such things is absolutely brilliant.
Its stated goal that attracted punters to invest in the stock is to own and operate a growing portfolio of geographically diversified wind farms.
Yet in February BBW suddenly announced a new policy of "demonstrating and capturing the value gap" between what management thought its wind farms were worth and what the Australian stock market thought via BBW's share price.
I rather thought the biggest single problem for BBW's share price was the company's name, but CEO Miles George only has good things to say about Babcock and Brown. As already noted, Miles George is an employee of Babcock and Brown.
It is no doubt purely co-incidental that BBW decided to stick a ''For Sale'' sign on its wind farms just when BNB was slipping into crisis at the start of this year.
And one is left to speculate about whether it might have been harder for BNB to unload its half of the Portuguese wind farm operation if the BBW half wasn't also for sale.
In any event, BBW in August proudly announced the sale of its Spanish wind farms - 17% of its 2008 total capacity - at a profit of $266 million before transaction fees, thus ''demonstrating and capturing the value gap'', selling the farm to prove the farm is worth owning.
BBW couldn't find a buyer at a decent price for its German operations but the French operation is still on the market and today the Portuguese farms go - 13% of 2008 capacity - and at a loss of $11.7 million, but still apparently "demonstrating and capturing the value gap".
So, in quick order, the BBW business loses 30% of its capacity and a third of its geographical diversity, operating in four countries instead of six. And if a buyer can be found for France
It also rather looks like Portugal was the pick of BBW's wind farm crop. BBW reported EBITDA of $334 million last year. Magnum Capital says the Portuguese wind farm operation has forecast EBITDA of 100 million euros ($195 million) in 2009, so BBW's share would have been $97.5 million.
That's a vastly higher proportion of the business' profit than the 13% of capacity might indicate. Portugal is a lot more serious than most countries about alternative energy in general and wind farms in particular - and it's prepared to pay for it. The wind farm electricity has 15 years of government-guaranteed pricing agreements. Nice.
So having ''demonstrated and captured the value gap'' for the best third or so of its business, what's BBW doing with the money? Paying off some debt that it says it had no need to pay off, and buying back 10% of its shares.
And that's certainly worked wonders. BBW's share price is down by about a third since the buyback was announced in September.
Those who've touched shares with Babcock and Brown in the name should have had some idea of what they were getting into - the gouge and model have been very public knowledge.
But I can't help wondering if BBW investors might feel some sense of betrayal. Maybe, just maybe, there were people who bought into BBW because they believed in green energy and wanted to hold a diversified international portfolio of wind farms.
Instead they find themselves in the business of ''demonstrating and capturing the value gap'', albeit at a loss.
Taken to its logical conclusion, BBW will eventually sell all its wind farms, pay off all its debt and buy back all its shares, disappearing up its own fundament in a puff of wind. But it will have demonstrated that the farm was worth owning by selling it.
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