Category Archives: Investment

We’ve been told lies about Thames Water’s profits – and the cost of cleaning the sewage

This is now proved true: in a bid to save privatised water firms’ profits, the Tory government is asking them to spend less money on cleaning our water than is needed to do the job. You will drink dirty water; it will make you sick.

Earlier today, This Site reported that Thames Water – the privatised water firm that is in danger of collapse – has not paid any dividends to shareholders in six years.

That was the best information available to This Writer at the time.

However, new information has come to light:

Economist Richard Murphy has examined the finances of all the privatised water companies, and has come back with several conclusions:

  • Their operating profit margin is a staggeringly-high 35 per cent. From this, we may conclude that there is no reason for Thames Water to be in danger of insolvency.
  • Every single penny they have made in profit has been paid out to shareholders in dividends. None was reinvested in infrastructure or equipment (borrowing paid for equipment and the infrastructure was ignored). So Tories like those on the BBC’s Politics Live on June 28 were wrong when they said money has been invested in improving infrastructure. We can’t say they were lying because they may have been misinformed, but someone definitely lied to them.

Mr Murphy’s conclusion on this is stark: “The public is being fleeced by these companies who are simply treating the fact that the English consumer has had no choice as to who to buy water from as a means to extract profit from them.”

But that’s not all!

  • The industry has made investments – £77bn on equipment, the rest on other financial investments. This has been funded mostly by borrowing, with £13bn coming from shareholders. This means the claim (when water was privatised) that private capital would fund water after privatisation was nonsense gibberish; it is being funded by borrowing.
  • Mr Murphy’s figures show £13bn invested by shareholders, who have received £25bn in dividends, meaning that for every pound they have put into the industry, they have received nearly two pounds in return.

Finally:

  • It is clear that the water companies are environmentally insolvent. This means their business structures are not sustainable in terms of reducing pollution and if they are made to put in the necessary money to do so, they will go bankrupt.

What this means, of course is that the water firms have been polluting the UK’s waterways to a staggering extent. I’ll republish the part of Mr Murphy’s thread that covers this, so you have it straight from the horse’s mouth:

In simple language: because they decided to take their massively-overinflated profits for themselves rather than invest them in improving the sewage system, the water companies and their shareholders have created a problem that will cost £260 billion to solve – and if they are made to shell out that money now, they will all go out of business.

The government is therefore asking them to pay slightly more than one-fifth of that amount – but as a result, your water supply will be polluted by the sewage and other rubbish that the water companies have pumped into the ecosystem.

This means the Conservative government – and you need to bear it in mind if you have a Tory MP – has said that it is happy for you to be made ill by polluted or infected water, in order to allow privatised water firms to continue making a profit.

The answer to all this, of course, is re-nationalisation.

Ah, but the government says this is too expensive, because of the cost of buying out the shareholders!

Is it, though?

Mr Murphy says no compensation should be offered to shareholders at all, because they have behaved in an irresponsible way that means it will cost more money to fix the problems they have created than they originally paid to own their parts of these firms.

He adds that providers of loans to the water firms may have to take a hit as well, because they made bad decisions in lending to these companies.

The Tories in government are unlikely to accept this because, even though it is in line with a basic principle of business that if you invest in something unprofitable, you lose money, it diverges from their strategy in privatising water in the first place: that the profits would go to private shareholders and it is the losses that will be paid for by the public and customers.

Mr Murphy makes another excellent suggestion – which is that, because the water industry will need to be supported with borrowed funds, it should issue water bonds to the public via ISAs. You could save in a way that ensures we get clean water in the future.

I appreciate that this is a lot of information but it is very important information that could affect your health, and that of your family and children in the future.

So please share this article to ensure the information in it is seen by as many people as possible.

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Should water firms charge an extra 40% to tackle the sewage crisis?

You pay for their bad decisions: the privatised, profit-driven water firms have had more than 30 years to fund the restoration of the UK’s crumbling sewage system but instead they have given £72 billion to investors and pumped our effluent into the environment. Now they want to increase our bills by almost half to fix the problem they have created. But where will the money really go?

It looks like the UK’s privatised water firms are trying to sell us down the river again.

They want to add an extra 40 per cent to our bills, saying that’s what it will cost to clean up the sewage crisis they have caused by neglecting the UK’s crumbling system of sewage pipes.

Here’s a report about it, broadcast early in the morning of Wednesday, June 28, 2023:

It’s true that Thames Water boss Sarah Bentley has quit her job, that was worth £1.6 million a year to her, even before she got anywhere near the bonus she received (that she has already given back amid anger over the firm’s poor performance over sewage):

We don’t know how much her bonus totalled but last year she received £496,000.

Unlike many of the water firms, it turns out that this was much more than Thames Water shareholders received – they haven’t had a payout in six years, possibly because the business seems about to go down the pan:

Thames Water is an unusual case, though; since privatisation in the late 1980s, water companies have paid out £72 billion to shareholders.

Should this money have been invested in restoring the crumbling system? Has such investment been watered down to give a fast return to investors?

Panellists on the BBC’s Politics Live thrashed their way through these murky waters in two debates, when it seemed the Tory panellists, Bob Seely and Johnny Mercer, knew why this disaster has happened, but the left-wingers had the solution to it. See for yourself:

The funding system certainly seems to be sending our money down the drain.

But isn’t that because water is not appropriate for privatisation and is, as Mr McKenna suggested, a racket?

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Labour does u-turn on green investment pledge. Does that party have ANY policies at all?

Rachel Reeves: it’s a big smile but the eyes are utterly vacant – like her policy platform.

Rachel Reeves has announced yet another StarmerLabour u-turn, leaving voters questioning whether the party has any policies it will not betray and asking why they should ever vote for it.

Speaking on the BBC’s Today programme, Reeves scrapped Labour’s promise to invest £28 billion per year on green projects, funded by borrowing. This was in line with a Labour commitment that it would only borrow to invest, and not to support day-to-day spending.

She said she would increase investment after the time of the election, reaching £28 billion per year “after 2027”.

How long after 2027? We’ve heard weasel words like these before. It’s a “sometime/never” promise that means nothing.

Remember: the entire planet is in an environmental crisis, with catastrophic and irreversible disaster only a few short years away if no change happens.

Tory politicians have been talked out of shifting to green policies by the fossil-fuel industrialists who stand to lose profit by the change. They probably threatened to cut donations to the party.

Has the same now happened to Labour?

The announcement has been greeted with disgust on the social media.

See what I mean?

That’s an easy question to answer: under Keir Starmer, Rachel Reeves, Yvette Cooper, David Lammy, Wes Streeting and the rest, UK Labour stands for the acquisition of power for its own sake and the enrichment of the individuals named above – in the same way Tony Blair’s New Labour did. Or so it seems to me.

Labour’s problem now is the sense of betrayal that voters are feeling across the nation:

And those voters are already looking for alternatives:

People will certainly be looking for a political movement to support that won’t betray its promises and make liars of its representatives on a regular basis.

Obviously that won’t be Labour. Let’s be honest – it hasn’t been Labour for years. Think of the way Starmer lied his way into the party leadership and then systematically ditched every single promise he made in order to get there.

Who will you support, now?

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Privatised water firms are charging YOU to clean up THEIR act

Sewage being pumped into an English river: the water companies want you to pay £10 billion towards improvements in the system that will put a stop to this – after giving £66 billion to shareholders – who have done nothing. It’s an insult, isn’t it?

Nobody should be surprised by this. Yr Obdt Srvt (that’s me) stated that it would happen on This Site within the last few days.

It’s being reported that the privatised water companies in England have apologised for repeatedly pumping sewage into the country’s waterways and the sea around the British Isles – and have promised £10 billion of investment to modernise the sewer system.

But here’s the small print (courtesy of The Guardian):

Shareholders in water companies will initially fund the investments. However, the costs will be recouped from customers through unspecified increases in their bills determined by regulators, in a move which threatens to add further pressure to household costs.

So water customers are being made to pay extra for emergency work that should have been carried out since privatisation happened, and funded from the bills we have been paying.

The water firms have never done this, despite it being promised to us when they were originally privatised, because it would have interfered with their ability to pump £65 billion to shareholders in the same period of time.

As I write this, I’m watching the BBC’s Politics Live, on which Jo Coburn just said the water firms most recent annual payment to shareholders was £1.4 billion, up from £550 million the year before.

So they’ve nearly tripled the profits they’re paying shareholders while charging us for the investment in improvements that they should be providing from the cash they’re handing out in dividends.

Are you angry yet? If so, you’re still not nearly angry enough.

The panellists on Politics Live were angry, though:

(For completists, the full discussion is here.)

Despite handing out billions in dividends, it seems the water companies are also in debt:

And now they’re pleading poverty as the reason they’re going to take this extra cash from us (you won’t have any say in whether you pay it or not, remember; the water companies in each part of England have a monopoly there):

Already the government has been forced to defend the demand for you to pay more to get the improvements that British water was privatised in order to provide:

As you can see, Penny Mordaunt’s response was not satisfactory. In fact, in terms appropriate to the issue, it was, itself, sewage.

Labour’s Richard Burgon has the right idea:

The reason re-nationalisation is the answer is simple: it cuts out the parasites who’ve taken £66 billion that could have been used to modernise the water and sewage infrastructure.

Without those shareholders taking all that money and doing nothing to improve the system, water prices could have been much lower as well (and that was the other promise made to us when Margaret Thatcher’s Tories privatised water).

The whole process of water privatisation has been a massive con that has cost the British people tens of billions of pounds.

Amazingly, despite having had an opportunity to demand an end to it at eight general elections, the electorate has apparently been happy to accept this daylight robbery.

Are you going to accept this latest insult – not just to your finances but to your intelligence?

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Sunak’s callousness: carer left without a lightbulb and he talks nonsense about investment

Rishi Sunak: his policies left a carer in darkness because she could not afford a lightbulb for her kitchen; meanwhile he has had the National Grid upgraded in his local area so he can heat his private swimming pool.

After a carer was left without enough money to buy a lightbulb for her kitchen, Rishi Sunak – prime minister and richest man in the UK – tried to say he was putting more money into social care, as if that was going to help her:

His claim – that the best thing he can do for Nicky and others like her is to reduce inflation – is pure bunkum bafflegab.

Cutting inflation isn’t cutting prices! They’ll keep climbing but at a slower rate. And he’s absolutely, dig-his-heels-in-the-ground adamant that he isn’t giving carers any more in wages. That money is for billionaires!

Oh – and the amount he’s putting into social care?

He’s halved it (allegedly) before even starting to hand it out:

It’s clear that we can’t trust these politicians to give us the facts.

Every interview like this should be followed by a fact check report, explaining whether the claims made by the politician concerned are correct – or if that person is lying through their teeth.

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Rees-Mogg firm sold shares in Russian bank. Did it have insider knowledge?

Jacob Rees-Mogg: He doesn’t have a moustache to twirl villainously, so he had to adjust his glasses instead.

Isn’t this interesting? (And by “interesting” I mean deeply questionable and disturbing.)

Jacob Rees-Mogg is a partner in a company – Somerset Capital Management – that was criticised for investing £60 million in Russia’s biggest bank, Sberbank, after he called on then-UK prime minister Theresa May to impose tougher economic sanctions against Russia in the wake of the poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal, back in 2018.

Sberbank had been under European Union sanctions since the Russian invasion of the Crimea in 2014.

But the investment seemed a good one at the time. In March 2018 its London-listed shares were understood to be worth four times what they had been worth in May 2015.

But then, 23 days ago – as the Russia-Ukraine crisis started to gain heat – Rees-Mogg’s firm sold its last shares in the bank, netting £44.5 million:

Rees-Mogg himself is not involved in SCM investment decisions – but he does receive money that the company earns from its investments.

And he has been criticised for maintaining shares in the bank while being involved in UK government policy decisions about Russia and its president, Vladimir Putin.

The fact that he was involved in these debates makes the company’s decision to divest itself of these shares… questionable, if not downright suspicious.

The value of the bank’s shares, we’re told, has halved since SCM sold what it had.

It might all have been above-board. Rees-Mogg may have had nothing to do with the decision to sell.

But we will never know. And that’s what makes this suspicious.

There is a clear conflict of interest that has gone undeclared, unremarked, and ignored.

As part of the most corrupt UK government in living memory – if not in history – we all think he’s entirely capable of passing on information from policy meetings for the purpose of his own enrichment.

And that undermines trust in the UK government and its decisions – as a whole. We cannot safely assume that our leaders’ choices are made solely in the national interest because we have reason to believe that they are acting for themselves.

Have YOU donated to my crowdfunding appeal, raising funds to fight false libel claims by TV celebrities who should know better? These court cases cost a lot of money so every penny will help ensure that wealth doesn’t beat justice.

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Tory lord says foreign-owned firms perform better. But WHERE DOES THE MONEY GO?

Morrisons: the supermarket chain is currently subject of a bidding war between overseas investors. It doesn’t matter who wins; British shoppers will lose.

This Lord Grimstone is apparently a business minister, which explains why the UK’s economy is tanking after Brexit.

He reckons “overseas invested companies are more productive and produce more jobs”.

And he has pointed at the fact that foreign investors have spent more money acquiring UK-listed businesses in the last eight months than in the previous five years.

This Writer has just two points to make.

Firstly, are foreign investors perhaps bidding on UK firms because Brexit and Covid-19 have cut their value to a fraction of what they were?

These people are probably hoping to make a cheap investment that will turn into a massive profit when the economy starts opening up again. This leads me to the next point.

Secondly, if formerly UK-owned firms are bought up by foreign investors, won’t all the profits go abroad, rather than staying in the UK? Put simply, won’t they bleed us dry?

A good example of this is our privatised rail service, which is now largely owned by foreign government-owned rail firms, meaning the enormous prices we pay for our train tickets helps to subsidise cheap rail travel across continental Europe.

And millions believed the Tories when they said Brexit meant taking back control!

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Are Tory right-wingers proposing a ‘Northern Bang’ or just another clusterf***?

Money: Margaret Thatcher’s favourite thinktank, the Centre for Policy Studies, says England needs a “Northern Bang” – like the so-called “Big Bang” in the financial markets that ultimately led to the financial crisis of 2008-10. It’s begging for disaster, as Tax Research UK’s Richard Murphy explains.

Tories can’t help themselves, these days. Whatever they do turns into a “complete bureaucratic nightmare” and this plan is no different.

It’s certainly nothing new.

Let’s all be grateful to Richard Murphy for his analysis.

In his introduction, he states: “Margaret Thatcher’s favourite think tank, the Centre for Policy Studies, has published a new report suggesting what they call a Northern Bang – aimed at the Tory Red Wall seats.

“Let’s ignore the fact that they want to favour these seats over those in Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland. Instead let’s note that this is all the usual right-wing nonsense, including relaxing planning rules, providing state subsidies to big, foreign-owned businesses whilst ignoring those already based here, and reformed tax reliefs, for which there is absolutely no evidence of success in encouraging new investment.

“This is a Northern Whimper delivered by a think tank right out of ideas, but which still knows that its real purpose is to shovel wealth upwards from taxpayers to those who own and run large companies.

“The CPS report is here https://www.cps.org.uk/research/a-nor…​ and my proposals on capital allowances are here https://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/w…​.”

Here’s the video, and it’s worth seeing:

Have YOU donated to my crowdfunding appeal, raising funds to fight false libel claims by TV celebrities who should know better? These court cases cost a lot of money so every penny will help ensure that wealth doesn’t beat justice.

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Does money matter more than your life? Corporations prepare lawsuits against countries over Covid-19 protections


Remember the fuss over the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP)? No?

Let me tell you a story.

Back when the UK was part of the European Union, there was a move to create a trading partnership with the United States, allowing goods to flow between the two power blocs, practically tax free.

But problems arose over a so-called ‘Investor-State Dispute Settlement’ system that would have allowed corporations to prosecute individual nations if they passed laws that – for example – protected citizens from having to buy inferior goods that put their health at risk.

This would have interfered with the corporations’ profits, you see.

The possibility of entering an agreement that gave ultimate power to greedy shareholders rather than national governments that – at least nominally – exist to protect citizens killed the TTIP stone dead.

Now we have evidence of what a good idea this was:

Countries could soon face a ‘wave’ of multi-million dollar lawsuits from multinational corporations claiming compensation for measures introduced to protect people from COVID-19 and its economic fallout, according to a new report.

Researchers have identified more than twenty corporate law firms offering services to mount such cases, which would seek compensation from states for measures that have negatively impacted company profits – including lost future profits.

Measures that could face legal challenges include the state acquisition of private hospitals; steps introduced to ensure that drugs, tests and vaccines are affordable; and relief on rent, debt and utility payments.

Under controversial ‘Investor-State Dispute Settlement’ (ISDS) mechanisms, foreign investors, companies and shareholders are able to sue states directly at obscure international tribunals over a wide range of government actions… in what the researchers describe as “a parallel justice system for the rich”.

This Writer is not aware of the UK being a part of any ISDS procedure, and it is clear that any agreement to take part in one would be an offence against democracy.

Note very carefully that the UK’s Conservative government was very keen to take us into such an agreement with the United States, as part of the EU.

I can only agree with Labour’s John McDonnell…

… and urge that anyone hearing of such lawsuits taking place here in the UK let me know immediately.

Source: Exclusive: Countries to face a ‘wave’ of corporate lawsuits challenging emergency COVID-19 measures | openDemocracy

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While others suffer, this friend of Boris Johnson has made a fortune from the coronavirus

Crispin Odey: This supporter of Boris Johnson bet that coronavirus would crash the stock markets – he is profiting from your misery.

Hedge fund tycoon Crispin Odey has made £115 million from betting on a stock market crash due to the coronavirus.

He told the Mail on Sunday he predicted a crash, and has spent the last three weeks cashing in on it.

What a charmer.

He’s the Brexit supporter who reportedly wagered £300 million on a post-Brexit crash.

Some have said that he lost out because the markets hardly blinked when the UK Brexited at the end of January.

But the real hit is yet to come and we won’t know whether he was right until the transition period closes at the end of 2020.

How do you feel about the fact that this tycoon is picking up a pretty penny because of others’ misfortune?

Source: Hedge fund tycoon Crispin Odey makes £115million from this month’s coronavirus stock market crash – Internewscast

Have YOU donated to my crowdfunding appeal, raising funds to fight false libel claims by TV celebrities who should know better? These court cases cost a lot of money so every penny will help ensure that wealth doesn’t beat justice.

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