Britain’s shameful sell-off
THERESA May better act fast otherwise her promise to outlaw or take a critical look at foreign takeovers will be a waste of time. There will be nothing left to sell.
Top of the list for intervention, after the Hinkley nuclear delay, should be Softbank’s £24bn bid for Britain’s chip-design champion ARM. Selling would be a terrible betrayal of Britain’s investment in a high-tech future.
It looks as if the other mega-deal on the horizon, the Deutsche Boerse ‘merger of equals’ with the London Stock Exchange, may be losing momentum fast after the reluctant approval of Frankfurt investors. But there is other worrying stuff ahead. Qatar’s stake building in IAG, the owner of British Airways, could lead to the UK ceding effective control to a Gulf state.
The US Committee on Foreign Investment would have a fit if Qatar, a supporter of Hamas’ regime in Gaza, were to come anywhere near one of its major carriers.
Further down the pecking order the maker of iconic Raspberry Pi computer Premier Farnell has been bid for by US electronics rival Avnet, having gazumped an earlier offer from Switzerland’s Daetwyler Holdings. Another technology innovator joins all those already sold, including software writers Logica and Misys and Mike Lynch’s Autonomy that was chewed up and spat out by Hewlett Packard.
As for creative Britain, one of its glittering jewels Pinewood Studios, home of the Bond franchise, Star Wars and the Carry On films, is about to fall into the hands of US-owned private equity firm Venus Grafton Sarl.
The price may seem irresistible but selling the very stage where Harrison Ford nearly came to a nasty end on the set of Star Wars: The Force Awakens is treasonable. Pity the late Carry On matron Hattie Jacques wasn’t there to cushion the fall.
Downing Street needs to get a move on before our tech, financial and cultural champions are defenestrated and skills, patents and corporation taxes are denuded yet again.
Green mail
THE ugly spat between Sir Philip Green and the chairman of the Work and Pensions Select Committee Frank Field is unedifying.
Green should know better than to challenge Field, who is regarded as a saint in the Commons for the tremendous work he has done on pensions and welfare reform over the decades.
It is a pity that Field allowed himself to be drawn into a tit-for-tat row with Green and engaged in harsh rhetoric, calling Green ‘evil’. Similarly Green should have been restrained by his expensive army of advisers from outrageously accusing a Commons panel, which took thousands of pages of evidence, from being a kangaroo court.
It comes as no surprise that MPs are continuing their inquiries into Green, his informal advisers Goldman Sachs on the BHS deal and the long-standing relationship between Goldman and the Green family.
It was inevitable that Lady Tina, as the ultimate owner of so many of the Green assets, would be drawn closer into the affair as the complexities of Green’s business empire and its tax status came under closer scrutiny.
The biggest ongoing concern are the arrangements to keep the BHS pension fund afloat with its £571m buyout solvent. None of this is an academic matter for the 20,000 former employees and retirees who after a lifetime of saving rightly are fearful about the future.
Green claims to be negotiating in good faith, but if that were the case he would have put funds into ‘escrow’ with a chosen custodian months ago when it was clear BHS was heading into administration and wind-up. You cannot bargain with people’s lives as if you are flogging lampshades in a street market.
Green’s idea that he can simply float away on his yacht the Lionheart if people are not nice to him is a fantasy. As the former recent owner of BHS, he cannot do so. There have been a number of cases, such as Carrington Wire, where the owners have been forced to cough up after a Section 89 notice has been served.
The regulator has the powers to take matters to the courts if necessary to force payment. Authoritative sources suggest that Green could be in for a bill of £200m-£300m if the matter is to be settled.
The ‘King of the High Street’ still has to make arrangements to properly fund the Arcadia pension fund where the buyout costs have been put as high as £190m. This is a big number and after the BHS affair one can understand why employees from senior executives downwards might be nervous.
Green’s unfulfilled pledges, threats and the like are unconscionable. He should stop the cruising, put his shirt top back and do the decent thing without delay.
Sour taste
IF anyone ever tells you UK ownership doesn’t matter, ask the National Farmers Union.
German dairy processor Müller scooped up UK quoted Robert Wiseman dairies in 2012 and Dairy Crest milk production in 2015 with no one saying moo to a cow.
Now the NFU is complaining that at a time of rising milk prices Müller has put September prices on hold depriving large numbers of its 1,900 farmer suppliers of income – after two desperate years in the doldrums.
Autsch!