The writer, Neil Collins, is one of the journalists that Izabella Kaminska introduced to us.
His Reaction mini-bio begins:
Neil Collins has been a financial journalist for two scores and ten years. Nineteen of those years were as the City Editor of the Daily Telegraph, followed by a column for the FT....
From Reaction Magazine, October 6:
Thames Water, the largest water and sewage business in Britain, used to have a slogan: “Running water for you”. Then someone pointed out how much of the water was running away in leaks rather than in baths and loos. What was running away even faster was the money, into the pockets of Macquarie, the investment bank once dubbed Australia’s Goldman Sachs. It was not meant to be a compliment.
That was then, and under relentless bombardment from the media, new-look Thames, along with the other water and sewage businesses in Britain, has decided to come clean. Here’s the plan: almost no dumping of sewage into waterways and beaches, almost no horrid chemicals escaping, and more reservoirs to avoid tomorrow’s hosepipe bans (or worse).
It all adds up, the water companies’ trade body claimed this week, to a curiously-precise £96 billion of investment by 2030 to fix these problems. The current shareholders are proposing to contribute just a few billion to this HS2-sized sum. It’s unlikely that the companies anticipated the thanks of a grateful nation, since we are expected to pay the rest.
Fair enough, since we are the beneficiaries, except that we seem to have paid once already. From privatisation to 2021, the companies awarded themselves £72 billion of dividends, racking up £60 billion of debt on their previously-debt-free balance sheets....
....MUCH MORE
Quickly locate the exits when someone sharp says to you "Fair enough,...."
