Fury at Royal Mail sell-off as public left in the dark over who bought £750m worth of shares – Mirror Online

Last Updated: June 14, 2015By

Osborne is trying to bribe us all into looking the other way, by offering a measly one per cent of shares to Royal Mail workers.

It seems that hedge funds have once again taken the vast majority of the shares on offer – at a three per cent discount. Labour has tabled a Parliamentary question to demand that ministers reveal the identity of all buyers.

Business minister Sajid Javid has tried to sell us a duff line that the sale is good for taxpayers because the money will be used to reduce public debt; he must think we’re all idiots.

He’s trying to convince us that a one-off payment (of less than the shares are worth) is better than multiple dividends from a profitable concern, continuing far into the future. That’s nonsense and he knows it.

Mystery surrounds the wealthy buyers who grabbed a cut-price £750million chunk of Royal Mail on Thursday.

The Government halved the taxpayers stake in the postal giant to 15%.

But anger erupted as the public were shunned in favour of large investors.

And the identity of most of the wealthy buyers is unknown.

A stock market announcement only stated that 150 million shares were placed with “institutional investors”.

One of those is understood to be successful fund manager Neil Woodford.

His firm, Woodford Investment Management, is already Royal Mail’s biggest private investor and is believed to have upped its stake above 5%.

Source: Fury at Royal Mail sell-off as public left in the dark over who bought £750m worth of shares – Mirror Online

6 Comments

  1. Rupert Mitchell (@rupert_rrl) June 14, 2015 at 11:09 am - Reply

    Only a fool thinks everyone else is a fool.

  2. Jim Round June 14, 2015 at 12:44 pm - Reply

    “But anger erupted as the public were shunned in favour of large investors”
    Where is this anger?
    Who is furious?
    The article from the 11th of June has a grand total of no comments.
    Some fury and anger.

    • Mike Sivier June 14, 2015 at 10:02 pm - Reply

      Perhaps all the angry people agreed, and didn’t feel a comment was necessary?

      • Jim Round June 14, 2015 at 11:30 pm - Reply

        Doubt it, sounds like no one gives a monkeys as usual.
        NMacs comment below about corruption says it all.
        Can no-one in the Labour Party lift the lid on all this corruption, mind you, they mooted privatising part of it.
        Their apparent silence on benefit related deaths and many other things is disgusting, but sadly not surprising.
        Where is the much vaunted SNP (ha ha) or are they in on it also?
        The Lib Dems (stop sniggering at the back)
        And The Mirror has a cheek, have you seen todays (Sunday) front page?

    • Jonathan Wilson June 15, 2015 at 8:16 am - Reply

      The lack of comments is not unexpected as the Mirror has only just started to put comments on some of its pages, at random, and often not when the article is first aired. Sometimes the Mirror pages “comments” section just appears days after it is initially FB’d where the comments are numerous, uncensored and outside the control of the Mirror.

  3. NMac June 14, 2015 at 3:38 pm - Reply

    Corruption, Corruption, Corruption and, when you think it can’t get any worse, there’s even more corruption.

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