OFFSHORE windfarm company Marine Projects International (MPI) is close to winning a multi-million-pound deal that will secure the future of the business for several years, The Northern Echo can reveal.

Teesside's MPI, which is in the process of a management buyout, is in talks about building a windfarm development in 2007. It has also just signed a contract with an unnamed business for oil and gas work in the southern North Sea that will keep it in work until the end of this year.

It is also in talks about a major deal for another windfarm.

MPI's major asset is the £53m windfarm installation vessel the MV Resolution, the first of its kind in the world.

Instead of having to send a fleet of ships to build windfarms at sea, the Resolution sales alone, with cranes on board, and creates a steel platform to build the turbines and place them on the sea bed.

MPI is completing a £20m contract for a windfarm off the Cumbrian coast at Barrow, which it won despite strong overseas competition.

The Resolution was designed by the MPI team to overcome problems such as weather and the low capability of more traditional techniques of building offshore windfarms.

It can transport up to ten wind turbines and operate in water up to 35 metres deep.

MPI, which employs 60 staff, is in the middle of a secondary management buyout (MBO). Last year, its parent company, Mayflower, collapsed and MPI, formerly known as Mayflower Energy, was involved in an MBO with help from investment bank Mizuho International.

Directors are now buying Mizuho's stake in the business, at a premium, as originally planned.

Operations director Peter Blott said: "We at MPI are in the middle of a structured refinancing, which was always going to happen from the minute that Mizuho put money in to get us the MBO.

"We are paying Mizuho back, plus a premium."

The Resolution was the security for the MBO.

Mr Blott said the secondary MBO would be completed in weeks.