Qatar has begun talks with the UK government to invest up to £10bn from the gas-rich Middle Eastern state into key infrastructure projects in Britain.
Three thoughts. First, how come Qatar can do this and we can't do the same? Our contribution to a state funded bank for this work is pathetic.
Second, why don't we use QE for this instead?
Third, is this actually part of the deliberate plan to sell the state?
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What a myopic, farcical state of affairs!
Should be our pension funds investing in such projects, not Qatar. We shouldn’t be running our economy like its a banana republic basket case.
Where is the vision amongst Labour??
I wish I knew
Remember how the Tories used to wrap themselves in the flag? And how UKIP are now doing this, as a populist party opposed to ‘rule by Brussels’ and mass immigration? And yet this is where right wing politics now comes to in the UK. We are apparently so short of money we can’t even maintain or upgrade our own national infrastructure!
How utterly pathetic. Do other major developed countries behave like this? Maybe I’m wrong, but do the Germans, or French, or Americans or Japanese rely on outsiders’ money to do vital work in their own countries?
In the History of the British Empire the conventional view is that it was military and naval might only that mattered. But a surprising amount was “bought” one way or another. Often the military was either associated with or followed the money. The boot is now on the other foot we are being bought, just jook at our major football clubs for a start.
We’re not just being bought, our political and business elite are so intellectually bankrupt they’re actively looking to sell everything that hasn’t been sold already.
The cowardly state personified.
Not at all surprised. The Thatcher years were dominated by the desire to sell off our assets to outsiders hence Electricity water and gas being run by foreign companies who avoid tax like the plague. I consider it treasonous to dispose of National Assets paid for with tex gathered from the people of this country in the way the Tory party have done for the benefit of their apparent buddies. Would be nice to conficate Tory assets in the same way.
We are seeing the wholesale destruction of the political state and its replacement by a corporate, unelected and technocratic state. This will also be a largely borderless world, as the European Union eventually becomes the Atlantic Union and beyond that perhaps a global union. They will call this the so-called “rule of experts”; when in fact its the rule of corporations and behind them a few families and powerful foundations.
But there’s another way at looking at purchases of UK assets by foreign nations such as Qatar. This purchase by Qatar puts obligations on its rulers – they can never stray from UKUSA – because if they ever did…So who is really buying who? They’ve handed over the money and the U.K. has handed them a piece of paper. A lot can happen to a ‘piece of paper’. 😉
Every time I have occasion to try to find out who owns a company I am interested in it seems to turn out that the answer is Qatar. I have no idea why that should be, but I do find it makes me uneasy.
For recent examples: NHP, which was the largest landlord of Southern Cross following Blackstone’s restructuring was bought by a company called 3 Delta in 2006 with funds supplied by the Qatari Investment Authority. That is a company owned by the Qatari royal family and although it is not required to publish proper accounts it has significant interests in other large companies including a 26% stake in Sainsbury’s and a 7% holding in Barclays. It seems that a lot of its activity is done through Delta in its various guises: for example it holds property through Delta Commercial Property, which is registered in the Isle of Man. The returns for Delta Commercial Property are “consolidated” in one of a number of companies called Libra (some number. In the case of NHP that was Libra No.2, based in the Cayman Islands. 3 Delta’s non executive directors include a former permanent secretary to the treasury, a former official in the Crown Estates, and a former Tory Cabinet Minister.
The cost of the NHP investment was recouped by selling “asset backed bonds” and it turns out that some of them ended up with Lloyds. I have not been able to find out just how much of NHP is now owned by Lloyds: but a big part of Lloyds is owned by us, following the bail out.
Four Seasons is the second biggest provider of care and nursing homes in the UK. As it happens it was bought by Delta Commercial Property in 2006, and RBS and other financial institutions lent Delta £1.5 billion for that purpose. By 2007 Four Seasons was negotiating a refinancing package and by 2009 it was on the brink of collapse. A consortium of banks agreed to write off half of the debt by turning it into shares: £800,000,000 was written off in that way with the result that RBS ended up with 40% of the company in the form of overvalued shares which replaced £300 million of debt the company owed to that bank. I do not know what happened to that “investment” nor how it relates to the current position of RBS. All I see is that there is a lot of fancy dancing and when the music stops the losses all belong to us and not to Qatar. Four seasons was sold to another private equity group called Terra Firma om 2012 for a total of £825 million, which, so far as I can tell, is half of the debt it owed in 2009 and roughly equivalent to the amount of the debt converted to shares in that year. It seems that Four Seasons was to clear the outstanding debt before the sale completed but the language in the report I read is ambiguous and I am not in the least bit confident that RBS and the other lenders are breaking even on this deal
I also noticed that one of the owners of Circle (the private company which took over Hinchingbroke hospital in very murky circumstances) was a company called Blackrock, another private equity company. It owned 12.9% of Circle at the time of the privatisation. In a very curious transaction in 2009 Blackrock was said to have bought a subsidiary of Barclays called BGI: but in practice that purchase resulted in Barclay’s owning 20% of Blackrock: go figure. In 2011 a note to barclay’s accounts says “loss on disposal of a portion of the Group’s strategic investment in BlackRock, Inc.; the impairment of the investment in BlackRock, Inc.;”, and so it seems that Blackrock was not doing so well, and indeed millions were wiped off Blackrock’s share value that same year.That is not so surprising when you realise that barclay’s lent blackrock £2 million of the £6 million cash part of the purchase price of BGI in the first place: and that loan was accompanied by a “risk warning in the accounts to the effect that Blackrock might not be able to pay the interest on that loan. WTF? And it so happens that in 2012 Blackrock reduced its stake in Circle to under 10%. The purchaser of that stake was yet another company called Delta.
Given that the politicians, of all parties, have now been shown by themselves to be outright crooks, is it any surprise ?
How many of these crooks, and crooks of the past, are now esconced within the organisations they sold [gave away] ?
And how many of them are plotting to get richer by selling the state to foreign powers ?
Treasonous thieves are what we elected, we deserve what we have for not seeing them for what they are.
Oddly enough, when Obama was accused of being in the pay of a foreign power I was quite shocked that such an accusation could be levelled and assumed the accusers were paranoid and that it could not happen here. I still do not see it as treason in that sense. But to the extent that plutocrats are stateless it is a meaningless distinction, increasingly. And to the extent that a foreign power still sees itself as a foreign power (which may be the case if some of these plutocrats are not wedded to class rather than state) we may well see a rerun of history as farce: without wishing to Godwin the issue I think that the plutocrats of their day were similarly blind and thought that they could control the National Socialists as they control parties on the left. They were wrong and it may turn out that they are wrong in the same way but on a different scale today.
The linked article suggests that all of our energy is going to end up in the hands of foreign powers. Given the impact of OPEC in the 1970’s, is that really such a good idea?