lower electricity price for inflexible base load power stations such as British Energy had. The purchase of Eggborough occurred at the peak of the market for power stations, and in 2002, the value of the station was written down by half. In 2001, the company was the major partner in taking on an operating lease to become the operator of Bruce Nuclear Generating Station in Ontario, Canada. The resultant subsidiary was called Bruce Power. As part of financial re-structuring, Bruce Power was sold to a consortium of Canadian investors in February 2003. In 2007, British Energy entered into a seven-year partnership agreement with Doosan Babcock Energy to provide technical, engineering and operational support across all British Energy sites. The agreement was at the time held to be potentially worth around £550million, bringing up to 800 jobs into Scotland and the rest of the UK. Financial difficulties The company faced financial trouble from 2002, when it first approached the British government for financial aid. This followed a slump in wholesale energy prices, a failure to obtain relaxations on the Climate Change Levy, and renegotiations of its back-end fuel costs with BNFL, as well as issues with a number of its reactors (resulting in much capacity being offline during critical periods of the company financial crisis) and a failure to complete a timely sale of its joint-venture share in AmerGen. Parties to the resulting talks included bondholders, significant but unsecured creditors, power purchase agreement counterparties, and a group of secured creditors known as the Eggborough banks; who had provided financing for the purchase of the Eggborough coal-fired power plant in 2000. The plan that resulted from these talks nearly eliminated any equity interest of existing stockholders; the firm's creditors waived over £1billion of debts in return for control of the company. Shareholders received only 2.5% of the shares of the new company. On 22 September 2004 the UK government's investment of over £3billion in the restructured firm was approved by the European Commission. On 24 September the company was reclassified as a public body in what the Office for National Statistics described as a reflection of "the control that can be exercised by government over British Energy". This move was described by The Times as a de facto nationalisation of the group. Restructuring Under the British Government's restructuring programme the Nuclear Liabilities Fund (NLF) acted as a creditor and liability receiver for