Thames Water bankrupt - privatisations - Thatcher

REVEALED: The 'fat cats' at nine water companies who pocketed 'excessive' £13M pay packages in past 12 months - including £2M-a-year boss at debt-ridden Thames Water now teetering on the brink of collapse

Last night it emerged that bosses at nine water companies were paid £13million in just one year, as public outrage over river pollution and ongoing water leaks.

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Thames Water bankruptcy and 

The 40 year UK disaster of 'privatisation'

Excerpts from newsletter of top London investment advisor Bill Blain:

"The imminent collapse of Thames Water – the UK’s largest water company – reveals just how disjointed, hollowed-out, ineffective, but most importantly, how bust and broken the last 40 years has left the UK economy.



On Tuesday the CEO of Thames Water, Sarah Bentley, did a runner. She was paid a £3.1 to join the firm 3-years ago, received a £2 million salary and over £727,000 in additional bonus payments last year despite running the worst raw sewage polluter in the UK. 

She scarpered off with immediate effect yesterday. Was it the reaction to her proposals to fund debt with a 40% increase on customer bills?



Thames Water was once a modern public utility with roots back to the 1600s. It provided clean sweet water to 27% of England’s population. But it was privatised in 1989, acquired by German energy firm RWE in 2001, who flipped it on to Australia’s more malevolent native version of Goldman Sachs, the Vampire Kangaroo: Macquarie Bank, in 2005.

The Aussie Asset Strippers did well. They pushed up debt by $10bn, paid less than £100k in taxes, while paying themselves £1.2 bln in dividends for doing squat in terms of real investment into water infrastructure, before dumping its looted corpse on some pension funds.

Thames Water bonds are trading sub 50%. There are calls for the company to be re-nationalised – leaving shareholders with zero.

There is significant domino risk – Thames Water was first. Which will be next?

Margaret Thatcher said:

“Socialist governments ... always run out of other people’s money.”
We might think:

“Conservative governments ... always give away our money to their chums."



The UK’s infrastructure crisis might be solvable if it was just one water company – but it's all of them. And the Railways. And the Roads. And Education. And the NHS. And the power companies. 

40 years of privatisation – the flagship Tory policy of the Thatcher-Major era - left the UK’s infrastructure broken.

Tories took great delight in privatising everything. Royal Mail, Capita, British Aerospace, Cable & Wireless, British Gas, British Telecom, British Steel, BP, Rolls Royce, British Airways, Water Companies, electricity companies, British Coal, National Power, Powergen, British Rail.

Many of these companies are less good today. Pretty much the same thing happened to every privatisation… new owners came in, levered them up to pay themselves dividends, flogged them on and left them broken.

British Rail was, in every single respect, a better, more profitable, more reliable firm before privatisation created a quagmire.

The privatisation of utilities in the UK has been a disaster. Now we pay for it."

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/thames-water-straw-broke-uks-back