When Rowaa Ahmar took a job as Head of Public Affairs & Policy at Drax, the UK’s largest biomass power station, she didn’t expect to end up at the center of a whistleblower tribunal exposing deep dysfunction inside the company. But her clash with executives over Drax’s response to a damning BBC investigation has cracked open a wider story—one that implicates not just Drax’s corporate culture, but also suggests government complicity.
Her whistleblower case, now concluded with a settlement, has exposed troubling details about Drax’s internal culture and its attempts to manage fallout from a BBC investigation into its logging of rare forest ecosystems in British Columbia. But the implications extend far beyond one company’s corporate dysfunction.
Despite irrefutable evidence that Drax’s wood-burning operations contribute to forest destruction and increase carbon pollution, the UK government continues to funnel billions in public subsidies to the company under the Renewables Obligation (RO) and the Contracts for Difference (CfD) schemes, treating wood pellet as a “zero carbon” replacement for coal. Even as Ahmar’s allegations pointed to deliberate misrepresentations made to government officials, the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ) moved swiftly to reaffirm its qualified intention to continue subsidies to Drax on February 10, ahead of the tribunal. The case raises pressing questions about what the government officials knew, when they knew it, and why they appear willing to look the other way.
The Whistleblower Allegations
Ahmar alleges that after she questioned Drax’s response to the BBC’s Panorama documentary “The Green Energy Myth Exposed”, including whether the company had deliberately misled the government about its biomass sourcing, she was sidelined, and then eventually offered money to leave (with a non-disclosure agreement that would involve her dropping all allegations against the company). When she refused, she was placed on indefinite leave, and finally dismissed.
Panorama aired on October 3, 2022, just a few weeks after Ahmar had started in her position at Drax, and was known by Drax to be in the works before Ahmar’s employment. The documentary confirmed earlier evidence that Drax was harvesting trees from old-growth forests and even primary (never before logged) forests in British Columbia to make wood pellets, contrary to a history of repeated claims by Drax that it only sourced “wastes and residues.” Ahmar, who had previously worked in the UK’s civil service and who had been hired explicitly by Drax to manage governmental relations, was dismayed by the company’s lack of preparation for the inevitable backlash to the BBC’s revelations, the company’s inability to tell a straight story to the government, and by a pattern of Drax making false statements in the aftermath of the program.
Following Panorama, she raised the alarm—first in meetings and emails, then later through formal protected disclosures to Drax’s CEO, Will Gardiner, and other executives – that Drax’s response was endangering its future subsidies, a matter existential to the company. Ahmar alleged that particular Drax executives were especially responsible for misleading the government, among them Ahmar’s manager’s manager, Clare Harbord. This brought her into conflict with Harbord and other executives, including her direct manager, Jonathan Oates. Ahmar’s testimony provides many examples of Drax’s cavalier attitude toward reporting to the government, including that of a meeting at Drax where she “raised the fact that [government] officials said that they were very disappointed that Drax kept them in the dark about BBC Panorama, because they understood that the allegations in the programme were known to Drax three months before it aired. I suggested again that we gather data so we could give an evidence-based response. That was not supported by others in the meeting. I recall [the Head of Media] said the following to me; ‘why don’t you tell the [government] civil servants to f*** off?’ I also recall Mr Oates then instructed me to ignore [the government] for now.”
Drax tells a different story, claiming that Ahmar was dismissed not because she objected to Drax’s handling of the crisis but because of her management style. What has emerged from the Tribunal, however, is that while Ahmar’s “civil service style” was supposedly not appreciated by the team she was brought in to manage – a team that, she says, senior executives had initially told her was “dysfunctional” and thus required intensive management – Panorama aired just six weeks after she was hired. Thus it is impossible to separate the issues of Ahmar’s interactions with colleagues from the fallout from the documentary.
Reading the testimony and transcripts, it’s clear that Drax was a factional snake pit. Ahmar’s union representative, Chris Rawlinson, testified Ahmar had found herself in a “toxic workplace culture of gossip and backstabbing” when she started at Drax. A number of people named in Ahmar’s testimony are “no longer with” the company, including Alan Knight, the hapless Drax representative featured in the Panorama documentary, Clare Harbord, the number two at the company who was instrumental in firing Ahmar, and Tanisha Bebee, a biomass specialist on Ahmar’s team whom Ahmar quotes as having been dismayed by Drax’s response to Panorama.
The Panorama Documentary and Drax’s Response
Drax had an early warning that the Panorama program would be impactful, not least because Drax’s own sustainability lead, Dr. Alan Knight, was interviewed for the program. Drax knew the program would show that far from solely using wood “wastes and residues” to make pellets as the company claimed, the company was also using trees, including trees from old-growth and primary forests. Panorama stated that Drax’s own sustainability policy at the time claimed the company avoided damaging high carbon forests, thus the use of trees from primary forests meant Drax was breaking its own rules.
Drax’s new March 2025 sourcing policy, which states a number of nice-sounding provisions that are completely incompatible with clearcutting forests as is allowed under the UK biomass criteria, shows that Drax still expects the government will tolerate them misleading the public with impunity.
Panorama is a shocking expose – or, as a government official stated to Drax with typical British understatement, “not a comfortable watch by any means” that raised “a number of challenging questions.”
Seeing primary forests reduced to piles of rocks produces revulsion, not discomfort. The truly squirm-inducing part of the program is the interview with Alan Knight of Drax, who when confronted with evidence that Drax is logging primary forests, repeatedly and robotically repeats that Drax’s “business model” is, “we take sawdust…”
The program reveals that in a written statement later, Drax admitted it “did take logs from the primary forest, but tree species other companies didn’t want, so would have been burned anyway”.
But the program also quotes Drax as coughing up yet another excuse: that the clearcuts Panorama documented were not, in fact, in primary forests, because primary forests should not be near roads. While Panorama points out that proximity to roads is not mentioned in the FAO definition of primary forests, Drax’s CEO Will Gardiner nonetheless brazenly made the claim again, a full month after Panorama, on Drax’s website: “Drax has not acquired any Canadian licences for forests designated as primary forests under the UN Food and Agriculture Organization definition.” Such parsing of definitions must be what Ahmar means when says that after Panorama, “There was a flurry of emails where Drax seniors were trying, at a high speed, to read legislation, and find loopholes in definitions, and debating what could be said or not said now, and trying to work out what could be said without shining a light on issues that might backfire in the future.”
The company’s response was chaotic and, indeed, continues to be so even to this day. Ahmar’s testimony quotes Stuart Cotten, Drax’s Director of Compliance and Regulation, as emailing on October 4, the day after Panorama aired, to say “that we had burnt pellets from Meadowbank and Burns lake ‘consistently’ at Drax Power Station since ‘at least 2019’. He admitted that if we had used ‘controlled’ material rather than ‘sustainable’ material, we would have committed a ‘significant misreporting of burn data under the RO and CfD’. He cautioned any statement being released before we verified the data.”
Thus one day after Panorama aired, Drax internally admitted misreporting. Around October 26, Ahmar had a meeting with Cotten, where this was confirmed: “He said he had sufficient evidence to know that Drax did not have the data to prove what the wood pellets we used consisted of and so we could not prove that they were from sustainable and legal biomass.”
Around October 27, Ahmar warned her colleague who signed off on forms to the Sustainable Biomass Program, which Drax uses to certify its pellets are “sustainable,” that the process was “fact free”.
Nonetheless, on November 3, one month after Panorama aired, Drax’s CEO Will Gardiner published a statement full of misleading claims on Drax’s website with the following header:
Now is probably a good time to show a picture of the primary forests plots that Drax logged that Drax said were not a primary forests, due to the proximity to roads – seemingly a self-fulfilling prophecy as Drax had punched in a 500-meter road for access to the first site, then leveled both sites to rubble.
Drax’s arrogance and shocking lack of self-awareness about its role in destroying forests has continued even into the trial. Jonathan Oates, who still works at Drax and was Ahmar’s manager, states in his written testimony:
“By way of context: Panorama was not actually alleging that Drax had done anything illegal. My own personal view was that the broadcast wilfully misrepresented the forestry licensing process in Canada, and was incredibly patronising – a group of journalists in London thinking that they knew what was best for Canadian forestry.
Earlier in 2022 I had spent time with the Canadian foresters with whom we worked, discussing how to educate stakeholders on all things Canadian forestry. These included First Nations communities like the Tsi Del Del – for whom sustainability was clearly very important – who had expressed irritation to me, in short, that they were being told how to manage their lands by people over in Europe (the phrase they used was ‘eco-colonialism’).”
Pinnacle, prior to its acquisition by Drax in 2021, also may have been lying about its use of wood from primary forests to the Sustainable Biomass Partnership, as well. The 2020 SBP audit for the Meadowbank plant, the plant featured in Panorama as receiving the logs from the primary forest site, states “zero” use of wood from primary forests:
Did Drax really not know it was sourcing trees as feedstock?
Overall, the impression is that after Panorama, Drax went into a tailspin, seemingly taken by surprise by evidence it was using trees as feedstock, and specifically trees from primary forests. The government has, at various times, also put on a performance of dismay. But are these performances justified or even credible? We think they’re not, because in reality, for more than a decade, NGOs and scientists had been challenging Drax’s claims that it only burns pellets made from wastes and residues (either supplied by Drax-owned pellet plants or other suppliers like US wood pellet giant Enviva). Both Drax and the UK government knew about these challenges, so the performance of shock following Panorama, followed by promises of new “reforms”, is not convincing.
Evidence of Drax’s real practices is easily available. For example:
Media stories – this is a selection from 2014 – 2016 showing extreme concern about Drax, specifically
An overview of clearcutting for pellets in US forests covering the period 2014 – 2021 was produced and continually updated by the Dogwood Alliance and NRDC. This was repeatedly presented and reported to Drax and the government.
PFPI’s 2016 report to the US Securities and Exchange Commission on Drax supplier Enviva dissected Enviva’s false claims that the company used wastes and residues to make pellets. Drax is featured in the report. Drax was apparently trying to reduce its dependence on Enviva; by 2015, Drax was operating its own pellet production facilities in the US.
Parliamentary briefings: Along with Duncan Brack from Chatham House, PFPI gave two Parliamentary briefings in 2016 laying out the carbon and forest consequences of burning forests for “renewable energy” (link to April 2016 briefing). Rebecca Heaton, who was later appointed “Group Head of Climate Change” at Drax, attended at least one of these briefings.
Paid advertising in Parliament’s magazine “The House” in 2017, and a detailed backgrounder that explained the numbers behind its conclusions that UK biomass was trashing forests and increasing emissions. Also running that day was an essay by MP Tommy Shepard with the pithy and delightful headline, “Burning wood on an industrial scale is daft.”
A 2021 complaint about Drax under the OECD Guidelines for Responsible Business Conduct: The year before Panorama aired, PFPI, our UK partners the Lifescape Project, and other NGOs submitted a complaint directly to Drax laying out detailed allegations and photographic evidence that Drax’s pellet manufacturing was contributing to the destruction of important forest ecosystems in the US and Canada (see page 48 of complaint). Incredibly, the Ahmar testimony mentions that a colleague at Drax told her in 2022 that Drax had spent millions defending this claim – so there can be no question they were extremely familiar with the charges it made. Ahmar’s colleague said discussions with the UK’s OECD representative (who was based in the Department of Trade) had made it clear that “Drax was at fault” but the advice from Jonathan Oates, Ahmar’s manager, and Clare Harbord (Oate’s manager) was that “the company should not apologise, be forward leaning with the Department of Trade or issue a statement as that would mean Drax would be ‘admitting liability’ and this would be a ‘PR nightmare.’” In other words, Drax knew the charges of logging primary forests had been made, and documented – they’d then spent millions for their lawyers to go over the report with a fine-tooth comb – but the company had ultimately responded with denial and bluster.
Publicly available satellite imagery. Meanwhile, all along, anyone who knows how to turn on a computer could have seen that the claim that Drax mostly burned sawdust was likely to be false, by viewing publicly available satellite imagery from Google Earth, as shown below. All the images show logs piled up at Drax pellet plants, ready to be used as pellet feedstock.
Pinnacle Meadowbank, British Columbia, Canada
Pinnacle Burns Lake, British Columbia, Canada
Pinnacle Smithers, British Columbia, Canada
Pinnacle Entwhistle, Alberta, Canada
Drax plant in Gloster, Mississippi, USA
Drax plant in Urania, Louisiana, USA
Drax plant in Bastrop, Louisiana, USA
The performance of an investigation
The scandal following Panorama triggered an investigation at Ofgem, the government office responsible for compiling data that Drax and other biomass users submit on biomass “sustainability.” Ofgem opened an investigation into Drax on May 31, 2023. According to Ahmar’s testimony, by that point, Drax already had commissioned its own reports from KPMG and Slaughter and May to examine its biomass sourcing practices and other issues at the company. However, instead of turning these reports over to the government, Drax asked for more time to do an audit – an audit they had apparently already conducted. They also didn’t initially turn over whistleblower docs to Ofgem. Eventually, they did turn over at least one of the multiple KPMG reports that had been commissioned, but as yet have not turned over the Slaughter and May report. Nor has the KPMG been made available to Parliament or the public. Meanwhile… Ofgem still awaits Drax’s audit.
Ofgem later confirmed that Drax had misreported data on biomass sourcing between April 2021 and March 2022, but did not find evidence “to suggest deliberate misreporting.” What Ofgem’s decision acknowledged was that the government’s own “sustainability” criteria allow clearcutting of forests and use of wood from primary forests – a fact that was later acknowledged by DESNZ’s red-faced statement that in the future, electricity generated by burning wood from primary and old-growth forests would no longer be eligible for subsidies (no word about the clearcutting, though). Ofgem imposed a fine of £25 million on Drax on 29 August 2024 for misreporting, which amounted to Drax not having confessed to burning wood from primary forests, which while allowed, is supposed to be reported. This amounted to a slap on the wrist for Drax, since there was no clawback of the billions in subsidies that Drax had received in recent years. The essentially slack attitude toward Drax at Ofgem is revealed in a new BBC story that found the same misreporting issue had occurred in other years, but Ofgem hadn’t picked this up. Ahmar’s testimony indicates that Drax executives themselves believed they’d been misreporting since at least 2019.
In fact the cozy relationship between Drax and its regulators shows up again and again. Even Jonathan Oates, Ahmar’s manager at Drax, admitted in testimony that “there is, you know, a bit of a revolving door, if you like, between the business and the Civil Service.” The latest example is the decision by DESNZ to continue subsidies to Drax at a higher rate per MWh than previously while limiting subsidized operation to 27% of its capacity. Additionally, the company should pass a “value for money” screen and the biomass criteria will be “strengthened” in ways that will do nothing to protect forests or reduce GHG emissions (see PFPI’s overview for details). Representatives from DESNZ justify this decision by mouthing Drax’s own talking points to a truly disturbing degree, as for instance when Jeremy Pocklington, Permanent Secretary at DESNZ, claims that Drax uses wood that would “otherwise be burnt at the roadside” (see Clip 2 at summary of recent hearings on biomass in Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee).
Conclusions
Three years after it aired, Panorama hasn’t lost its power to shock. But what is even more shocking is that since the program, Drax’s forest destruction has continued unabated, with no government action, and now, the government is proposing to extend subsidies for the plant for another four years under the continuing false premise that the company delivers “low carbon” power – backed up with a secret analysis of the “need” for Drax’s electricity that the government refuses to make public.
Instead of extending subsidies to Drax, the government should apologize and take mitigating action to somehow make up for all those forests that were logged and burned for so many years under its policies. Of course, true mitigation is impossible – these ecosystems are irreplaceable. But it’s truly egregious – an indication of true shamelessness – that the government would at this point contemplate continuing subsidies to Drax when their own policies have enabled the company to destroy so many forests for so many years. This destruction is bound to continue unless the UK ends its practice of burning trees for “renewable” energy.
