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2 Changes in the Environment that made the Bazancourt-Pomacle Biorefinery 51

Fig. 2.17 Initial investment Ini al investment for the
for the creation of
CRISTANOL in 2006 launch of Cristanol in 2006 Shareholders
’ Equity
18%
Quasi-equity
11%
Long-term
debt
71%

Resulting from the merger of the Reims, Aisne, Champagne and Ardennes
regional banks, the CANE had enough shareholder equity to fund the
Bazancourt-Pomacle Biorefinery agro-industrial projects. Indeed, the cooperatives
were growing in size, merging and/or buying up other companies, and their funding
requirements to support this growth were high. The origins of the CANE make it
above all “the bank for agriculture, wine-growing and agro-industry”, which is why
the bank agreed to take on the justified, bearable risk that was required to support
the investment at Bazancourt-Pomacle. It was aware of the risk and was committed
to local and agricultural development. Other banks would undoubtedly have reacted
differently.
Today, while the 2008 financial crisis and the events that it led to, in particular
the debt crisis in the Eurozone, continue to shake the world’s markets, banks, even
those that are closest to their customers, have become reluctant to take even
moderate risk. The investment required has driven cooperatives as a whole, and
the actors of the Bazancourt-Pomacle Biorefinery in particular, to turn towards
other funding sources, including complex financial packages. We will examine this
trend in the next section.

2.3 The Strategies and Solutions that Have made the Biorefinery
What It Is Today

In the face of these endogenous and exogenous changes, the Bazancourt-Pomacle
site chose to develop via the value chain upstream and downstream of processing.
Internal funding capacity was insufficient to ensure this growth and bank loans were
increasingly difficult to obtain, so the firms decided to turn to complex financial
packages.

2.3.1 Financial Packages
The cooperatives at the Bazancourt-Pomacle site were thus led to modify their
structure and to exist in a less “pure” state. These are made up of cooperatives or
unions of cooperatives with groups of non-cooperative subsidiaries. These