Hello Sifted reader,

British gigafactory startup Britishvolt was the belle of UK tech's ball in 2020, as its plans for a £2.6bn gigafactory in the north of England seemed set to solidify it as a cornerstone of the country's electric future.

Then it lost cofounder Lars Carlstrom, who left after news broke of a 1990s tax fraud conviction in his native Sweden. He said as he left that he didn’t want to become a distraction for the company.

But there’s more to the story than that. “I was not wanted anymore in the company,” he tells Sifted, accusing colleagues of dredging up the fraud conviction amid disagreements over the company’s decisions to hire at a rapid pace and to develop battery tech in-house.

Fast forward three years and Britishvolt is kaput — while Carlstrom is sitting at the helm of a new gigafactory venture, Italvolt. He says he's been promised more than a billion euros in investment, expects to employ 3,000 people and produce enough battery capacity a year for 400k cars.

Freya Pratty finds out how he plans to do it.

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