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Saturday 3 February 2018

Daily Mail Carillion Sponging Shame

The Daily Mail is in uplifting and optimistic mood this morning: “LET’S SAVE 7000 LIVES A YEAR … That’s what could be achieved if prostate received the same funding as breast cancer” declares the front page headline. And it would be such a bargain: “Just £290,000 a week … would bring prostate funds in line with breast cancer and dramatically improve survival rates, experts say”. But even £15 million a year is hard to find nowadays.
What's so f***ing wrong with having a f***ing £708k pension paid for by c***ing plebs, c***?!?!?

Why might that be? Well, quite apart from all those competing demands not just on NHS funding, but for all taxpayer cash, there are all those unnecessarily expensive PFI projects having to be paid off. And what the Mail is not telling its readers is that when they stump up their taxes, some of that money is siphoned off into the pension pots of the Mail’s most senior staff - including the legendarily foul mouthed Paul Dacre himself.

How can that be? Well, Carillion - and by now we’ve all heard of them - did not just build and manage all those PFI projects, like hospitals. They sold some of the management contracts on - which brought in much-needed cash to keep the show on the road. The result of these transactions is summed up by a headline from the Independent.

This reads “Carillion made £500m in revenue from selling PFI projects and netted annual returns of up to 39%, research finds … Several firms that bought the projects from Carillion are based offshore meaning they pay no UK corporation tax on the profits they derive from public money”. And who might have benefited from the arrangement?
Several projects were bought by Secondary Market Infrastructure Fund and Land Securities Trillium, both of which are earlier names for what is now Semperian, a company based in Jersey and part-owned by the Daily Mail Senior Executives Pension Fund”.

And one look at Semperian’s website tells you what the name of their particular game is. “Semperian owns an interest in 91 assets, with the following characteristics … Mostly Availability based income source, providing 91% of future income … High degree of asset control, with an average of 80% ownership of each asset … The average remaining life of the investments is in excess of 15 years”. The dosh just rolls in. Trebles all round!

As a case study, we see “The Great Western Hospital … a district general hospital that opened in December 2002 on a green field site, replacing the Princess Margaret Hospital in Old Town, Swindon … The PFI Concession (‘THC’) is wholly owned by Semperian, and Imagile manages the on-going obligations of the PFI project through a concession, which is scheduled to terminate in 2029. THC's partner and principal building occupier is the Great Western Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, which leases the premises from THC”.
Better for overpaid newspaper executives, that's for sure

How pleasant that must sound to Semperian’s owners - especially the Daily Mail Senior Executives Pension Fund. Those senior executives all go private, their paper gets to slag off the NHS at every turn, yet their pension pots are being enlarged by taxpayers paying through the nose for all those dubious PFI deals. Which the Mail manages to ignore.

Paul Dacre’s annual pension now stands at £708,000. So if he and his fellow executives want to see better prostate cancer survival rates, they know what to do. Yes, of their own volition and without anaesthetic, they can get their wallets out. No pressure, chaps.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

There is no excuse for anyone to plead ignorance of the PFI scam.

Paul Foot exposed it for what it is fourteen years ago - especially New Labour's role in making it even worse.

See http://drphilhammond.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/PFI-Report-Private-Eye-2004.pdf

The tories of course will continue to be their usual verminous selves and protect the rip off. Alert citizens will note not one of the New Labour gang has condemned the scam. In particular, New Labour "Baroness" Morgan "of Huyton" was an appointed member of Carillion's "business integrity committee", quite apart from her employment at Yank-owned Lloyds Pharmacy......If we had a political system even remotely interested in truth and a fair society she would be up in front of the Beak post haste.

Corruption and hypocrisy, they names are tory, New Labour and LibDem. Your stenographers of purposeful theft are press and broadcast "news". The gang of you should be in prison, but the likelihood is you will escape with a small slap on the wrist (if that).

Our political system could do with sound fumigation followed by a wire brush scouring. We won't get it of course. There's too many on the take, too many "barons" and "baronesses" cowering behind bullshit ermine, too many oligarchs and Uriah Creeps, all with too much to lose.

And the same people bleat US hypocrisy style to other nations about "democracy" and "rule of law"......Pass the sick bucket, Alice, before history catches up with us.