Battling against the flow

The timing is not exactly felicitous. Thames Water paid its international investors £100 million in dividends shortly before it was fined a record £20 million for polluting the River Thames with 1.4 billion litres of raw sewage and had failed to hit leak targets – which in the water industry is akin to punctuality in the trains industry.

Thames Water can afford the divi because it turned an underlying annual profit of circa £600m, if well down on the £742m it made in the previous year. But it does not exude public relations sensitivity.