David Hencke
Westminster, Whitehall and Berkhamsted village news and views

Aug
26

Judge aids rescue package for ” bust ” privatised London fire firm

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Mr Justic Floyd-Helpful to AssetCo Pic courtesy:thisislondon.com

A High Court judge came to the potential rescue of AssetCo, the near insolvent owner of London and Lincolnshire’s fire engines, by granting the company  another month to negotiate an extraordinary deal with its  creditors to wipe out debts of over £100m.

Mr Justice Floyd, sitting  at the Royal Courts of Justice in London, granted applications to adjourn  moves until September 28  to wind up the firm in favour of allowing  the company to open negotiations with its creditors on a deal that will recover some of their lost investments.

Mr Lloyd Tamlyn, for AssetCo, explained that if the company went bust now, the banks and other investors would be lucky to get 0.5 per cent of their money back. But if they agreed to negotiate with the company on a deal they could walk away with 23.5 per cent. In return they would have drop any further demands for cash, wiping out the £100m plus owed by the firm.

 In effect investors in AssetCo look set to lose some £77m. Since the judge was aware that this case was being reported, AssetCo were careful not to ( as at other hearings) list who is owed what.

But from the previous hearing ( where the registrar was not aware he was being reported) the creditors named included  state-owned Halifax Bank of Scotland which is owed £12m and energy company, EDF, which suggests AssetCo may not have paid fuel bills for premises they run in London. Others include FD Direct, the Inland Revenue. They will still be big losers.

The difference the deal would make is shown by Northern Bank who are owed £1.3m and have been very active in opposing moves by AssetCo to give preferential pay outs to its lawyers and accountants.

Adam Goodison, for Northern Bank,  who had pressed for the company to be wound up, explained to the court why the firm is now ” content”  for the deal to go ahead. This followed negotiations that changed the creditor status of Northern Bank, so it could benefit from the proposed pay out.

If AssetCo went bust the bank would be lucky to get £10,000 back from the £1.3m they put into the company. Under the revised deal the bank would get back nearer £300,000. The same would apply to other creditors.

 The question – dealt in passing during the hearing – is where has AssetCo got the cash to even finance this deal? It appears to have come from money raised from international financiers who have given another £10m cash to the company on top of money raised earlier this year which severely diluted its share price to near junk status.

At the last court hearing the financiers were named as North Atlantic Value LLP, a part of the J O Hambro Capital Management Group, Utilico Investments Limited and Henderson, which incorporates the interests of Gartmore Investments Limited.

A hint came from Northern Bank’s lawyer after the hearing when he told me that the deal could be “good news” because it could rescue the company and remove most of its debts. He thought investors were ” taking a punt” on the firm’s future.

The majority of the investors will still have to agree before the deal can go ahead and it will need final approval of the court on September 28 – but the judge’s move means that it could get Brian Coleman, Tory chair of the London Fire Brigade, off the hook from seeing London’s fire engines owned by administrators.

 Once the debt is cleared it then makes the company more attractive to a take over. Nothing more was said in court about a bidder – known to be Arcapita Bank in Bahrain – which suggests they have gone cold on the idea.

The situation is far from satisfactory and does not rule out a slow death of the company,reflected in its low  2.2p share price, valuing it at £5.52m today.

FBU general secretary Matt Wrack said: “Privatising emergency services is stupid and dangerous. The long, slow death of AssetCo is a perfect illustration of this.  We still do not know what is going to happen to London and Lincolnshire’s fire engines.  They are, we believe, going to be the property of AssetCo’s creditors when AssetCo finally goes under.  I call on the London Fire Brigade and the government to bring the fleet and their maintenance back into public ownership.”

This blog was trying to contact Tudor Davies, head of AssetCo, for a comment.

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Aug
24

Update: Near bust AssetCo to try and stave off insolvency again

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AssetCo, the troubled owner of London and Lincolnshire’s fire engines and military contracts in the Middle East, will make a desperate attempt to stave off bankruptcy at a hearing at the High Court tomorrow (thursday).

The near bust firm will be up before Mr Justice Peter Smith in Court 61 in the Chancery Division of the High Court in the Strand pressing for yet another adjournment as it fails to clinch a take over deal with Arcapita, the Bahrain based company. The court hearing begins at 10.30 am ,though AssetCo is at the bottom of the list, and the case may not be heard until later in the day.

In another desperate move the firm will produce at the court draft  documents to be presented to its many creditors in the hope they may stave off the evil day when it will have to cease trading. Details of the documents have not been published but a majority of creditors will have to agree before the company can be saved. The last time the company appeared before the court it said it could go bust owing £140m to banks,electricity companies and suppliers.

Will the judge still be sympathetic to this ill-fated example of privatisation? We will have to wait events.

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Aug
11

Smart riots need smart solutions

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Rioter in London: Pic courtesy: Daily Mail

Are we going to fall into a simplistic trap over the riots that gripped London and England this week? So far much debate on the causes, much discussion on bringing the people who did this to book, and a sort of numbness over the horrific and frightening scale of it. But what is the long-term solution and how should we deal with the smart phone savvy generation that perpetuated it?

Up to now the debate has concentrated on making sure the people are punished – from ludicrous calls from one Tory MEP to shoot the rioters on the spot to making sure we fill our overfull prisons and detention centres with every single person who was on the streets. As David Cameron said today: “We will track you down, we will find you, we will charge you, we will punish you. You will pay for what you have done. “

What of the cost to us the taxpayer of all this. Higher insurance premiums (a £200m pay out is on the way) or taxes running to hundreds of millions to pay for the damage to buildings is now to be followed by a huge bill  for legal costs, extra policing, and jailing the offenders. Remember the cost of  jailing each offender will be more expensive than the daily bill for educating David Cameron and Boris Johnson at Eton. And given the depressing picture of conditions at Wandsworth prison published this week by the Chief Inspector of Prisons,(see http://bit.ly/oEcESH ) much good may it do us.

It is likely that when the rioters emerge from these detention centres and prisons they be more savvy in avoiding detection, have lucrative drug dealing contracts, and learnt from hardened crims new ways to commit burglaries.

Looters in action in London. Pic courtesy ibtimes.com

So what is to be done? I have one suggestion – when people are convicted of damaging a police vehicle, fire engine, a shop and a home, or stealing goods they  should be presented with the bill and ordered to make a contribution to compensate the victim or the service.

Instead of going to prison they will bound over  by the courts to pay back money to victim or store - and  this will be enforced by either direct deductions from their wages or benefits or even from their credit cards if they have any, over a five, and in bad cases, a ten-year period. This would not apply if they had killed or seriously injured anyone where they would go to jail.

In case anyone thinks this is a ” bleeding heart ” soft option I would propose  very tough enforcement to back this up. If they fail to do this they will face - like a suspended sentence – going to jail for the full period of their repayment term, which would be much longer than a normal jail sentence for burglary or criminal damage. This would act as a strong deterrent but fewer people might want to risk going to jail.

Second there is a need to reconnect the alienated rioter with mainstream society. I suggest this is done by making him or her meet the victim, whether a small shopkeeper, the local fire or police station, or the local manager of  the wrecked Tesco’s, Carphone Warehouse or Barclays Bank. Then they might see this is not a victimless crime and that the people who work and live there are human beings with human feelings and their lives are blighted by such actions. The rioters may also want to see where the money is going and could mitigate the bill if they returned some of the stolen goods.

There needs to be a conversation between the community and the rioters not  separate anger among communities and young people themselves about what has happened.

How this can be organised  at a  time of huge spending cuts I do not know particularly when even some of the magistrates courts handling the emergency – such as Westminster - are about to be closed down, but organised it must be.

 Political leaders at Westminster and in town halls across England need to take the lead. Organisations like Victim Support and the probation service, must be able to play a role. There should be a simple way to set up an organisation that could pull this together. Any ideas?

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Categorized in Whitehall, town hall and riots
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Aug
05

Why Britain’s youth should be seen and not heard: the patronising view of a London Assembly Tory

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Gareth Bacon: A man who thinks young people should not question him.Pic courtesy: London fire brigade

An extraordinary e-mail exchange has taken place between Gareth Bacon, Tory London Assembly member, and Danny Hackett a 17-year-old Bexley constituent and a Labour activist.

Danny Hackett challenged Gareth Bacon why he has needed to claim up to £2000 a year to get free travel in London when he earned in excess of £150,000 a year – half of it from allowances as a London Assembly and Bexley councillor. Using material from this website he asked him to justify the claim. “A majority of people who live in London pay for travel themselves you should do the same,” he said.

Back came the reply addressed to, believe it or not, ” Master Hackett,” because as Mr Bacon explained later:”I addressed you as “Master” Hackett because that is the correct title for you – you are, after all, a minor. “

 He went on to explain he was claiming it because he had to pay far too much tax and that  ”means that more than half of  it does not reach me, indeed in effect it never leaves the Treasury and exists only on paper.”

Danny Hackett doing something that Mr Bacon would disapprove: Pic courtesy Danny Hackett

Mr Hackett found being addressed as Master ” patronising, rude and offensive” which really set Mr Bacon going and revealed his true feelings about the country’s youth.

“I suspect you have little or no experience of living apart from your parents, university, working for a living, supporting yourself, paying tax, having meaningful relationships, or raising a family. You have little or no practical experience of politics and no experience at all of public life.

“None of these things are faults in you, they are simply factors of your age. .. to be completely honest and fair with you, my advice would be to experience a little bit of life for yourself before you start criticising other people and preaching to them about how they should live theirs.”

However Mr Bacon has offered the youth a chance to vote ( he appears not to want to ban some teenagers from voting on the grounds they are too inexperienced) if he is 18 on May 3 when he stands again for the London Assembly- an invitation which should be taken up more widely.

“You will be able to exercise your prerogative at the ballot box and vote against me – be aware though, that holds no fears whatever for me, as a democratically elected politician.”

 I might suggest that lots of young people take up his offer and see whether he has any fears then.

 Neither Mr Hackett nor me are allowed to communicate with him. “I have nothing further to say to you” he has told Mr Hackett and he has told me when I raised  it with him : “I have nothing remotely to say to you.”

Believe it or not Mr Bacon is a youngish new generation Tory ( he had to tell Mr Hackett he was not an elderly gentleman) with I am afraid a mental age of nearer 139 than his actual 39. I imagine he would very much at home in Victorian England dragging naughty boys to his study to tell them off for daring to question his authority.

But we are in the 21st century and we live in an open society. So what do you think? E-mail Mr Bacon at his public work e-mail address gareth.bacon@london.gov.uk  if you disagree or back him.Email Danny at danny@hackett.org.uk  Tweet @dannyhackett if you agree or disagree with him.

If you want to see what Mr Bacon earns, where he works, as his strong views against trade unions and demonstrators, it is all on my website at http://t.co/0mKytVV. Health warning: Mr Bacon who doesn’t speak to me claims it is ” poorly researched.” Judge for yourself.

 

 

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Aug
01

Morecambe Bay Cockle Pickers: Does the government want it to happen again?

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The cockle picker victims of Morecambe Bay: Will cuts mean more to come? Pic courtesy bbc

Remember the tragedy at Morecambe Bay which led to the deaths of at least 21 cockle pickers? The public outcry that followed the exploitation of these Chinese workers led to the setting up of the Gangmasters Licensing Authority to protect migrant and other workers from future exploitation.

Since then it  has been very successful in both licensing gangmasters and working together to fight exploitation with other agencies like the UK Border Agency,the Serious Organised Crime Agency, the police and Revenue and Customs. 

A key test case will take place this autumn with the prosecution of  an Oxfordshire dairy farmer, and potentially 18 other farmers, for using unlicensed labour on their dairy farms. Other cases included investigations into shellfish farmers in County Antrim and a successful opposition to a licence being sought through a Facebook friend of a banned gangmaster who exploited Lithuanian workers.

In the last year its inspectors identified 845 workers who had been exploited to the tune of £2.5m, revoked 33 licences, and prosecuted 12 firms. Some 91 per cent of operations identified serious exploitation. Employers who appeal against its decisions have only a 5 per cent chance of success, 95 per cent of appeals are rejected.

Now any further success is being threatened by a triple whammy from the government. The latest annual report ( http://bit.ly/qp7yeo) reveals that in the last year the government is putting their effectiveness at risk.

Eric Pickles abolished funding for gangmaster intelligence

The biggest blow has come from none other than Eric Pickles, the communities secretary. His department abolished funding altogether to the agency from April. This funded work enabled the agency to set up intelligence operations with local councils and funded community enforcement officers. These posts have now gone.

 Then Caroline Spelman, the environment secretary, cut funding by five per cent and Francis Maude, the Cabinet Office minister, imposed a Whitehall recruiting freeze which has mean that skilled people have not been replaced.

At the same time the agency which relies on licence fees for the vast majority of its income has been told to freeze fees for two years, presumably to save business money.It is no wonder the agency’s annual report says: ” The authority faces a major challenge in seeking to prevent the exploitation of vulnerable workers with the prospect of fewer resources.” It also gives a lie to the government’s claim that cutting back office staff won’t have any effect. It admits that these cutbacks” may have an adverse impact on the ability to control risk in the future”.

 Under government spending cuts it will be cut again over the next three years as the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs  reduces its budget by eight per cent a year. Given it runs on a shoestring budget in Whitehall terms of under £5m a year and employs 89 staff, it seems remarkable value for money.

It would be a serious tragedy if penny-pinching by the government gave the green light to new exploiters to take advantage. If it does at least transparency makes it clear which minister to blame.

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Jul
25

AssetCo buys a month’s grace as investors asked again to bail it out

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AssetCo, the troubled company which owns London and Lincolnshire’s  fire engines, and is £140m in debt, has managed to negotiate a further lifeline from its investors.

 The company which faced being wound up today (July 25) at a High Court hearing in London has gained another month’s grace until August 25 to conclude the deal.

A statement from the company said:”"the Board of AssetCo has been in discussions with certain of its major stakeholders (being North Atlantic Value LLP, a part of the J O Hambro Capital Management Group, Utilico Investments Limited and Henderson, which incorporates the interests of Gartmore Investments Limited), ” for further refinancing of aanother £10m.

The price to be paid will be another dilution of the shares – worth just 1p before the deal and 2.50p – after the deal became public, and banks and other creditors will not get all their money back either.

The statement continued:”The strategy will focus  on developing the Middle-East business into a leading emergency services platform and on running the London and Lincoln contracts.  The refinancing proposal to be approved by shareholders will involve the ring-fencing of the LFEPA (london fire brigade)for the benefit of the London subsidiary lender group, although shareholders will retain an interest in any residual value. The Investor Group intends that following this fundraising, the Company will continue to be listed on AIM.”

 The company also said that talks were an advanced stage with a bidder-assumed to Arcapita, the Bahrain based private bank (see previous post), but significantly Arcapita has not signed the deal.

  At Monday’s hearing  the court was told  professional fees for lawyers and financial advisers amd the directors are costing £100,000 a week.

 Mr Justice Floyd warned that if the new private-sector bid failed, it could leave AssetCo with “nothing left in the kitty “.

 “If it is not successful then the assets of the company would look to be depleted by the professional fees being charged to the point where there will be nothing left in the kitty to reimburse creditors of any description “ he said.

  Professional costs to cover just a fortnight’s work restructuring and refinancing the company in the run up to a new bid were detailed in court.  AssetCo directors Tudor Davies and Tim Barrett would charge £40,000 plus VAT, solicitors £112.824 plus VAT and financial advisors would be invoicing for £50,000 plus £5,000.  

  The scale of debt-laden AssetCo’s financial meltdown was disclosed in court – £2.2M at the end of June had shrunk to just £700,020

     Creditors supporting the company’s call for the wind-up order to be adjourned included North Atlantic Value, owed £15.9M by AssetCo. The company, part of the J O Hambro Capital Management Group, which is proposing to contribute to anothedr £10m refinancing deal.. 

   Matt Wrack, general secretary of the Fire Brigades Union said : “ These assets should be brought back into public ownership. At the court today, we heard lawyers haggling over remuneration fees ASSETCO – costs soar as “new bid” staves off wind up – but still no assurances for Londoners.  

 PrIvatising essential services in crazy, as the AssetCo debacle continues to show. Fire engines in London and Lincolnshire should be brought back into public ownership as soon as possible.”

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Jul
22

Exclusive:Are London’s fire engines to be owned by a firm whose advisers advocate jihad?

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Arcapita's swish Bahrain hq: Picture courtesy:http://thebigprojectme

Just when the appalling story of the near bankrupt company,AssetCo, which owns London and Lincolnshire’s fire engines, nears its conclusion,  there is a new and extraordinary twist to the tale.

AssetCo in desperation to stave off bankruptcy on Monday is negotiating a take over with Arcapita Bank, a Bahrain based but Arab and Indonesian privately owned company. This firm because it is owned by Saudis is governed by Shariah law and any transaction must be approved by a special committee of  Sharia advisers.

 Now an investigation by me has come across extraordinary information about their advisers and their views and connections with militant Islam. Enough for me to contact the company in Bahrain and ask for an explanation. Which is more than Brian Coleman, chair of the London fire brigade and Bob Neill, the fire minister, can do- because they have rendered themselves  powerless to do anything  under the terms of the contracts in selling off the fire engines and recruiting auxilliary staff to AssetCo in the first place.

Here are the details and the company’s response. They are three allegations, that they employed an adviser considered so dangerous by the government that he is banned from entering Britain; that they currently employ an adviser who advocates aggressive military jihad and there were involved in a big controversy in the United States over allegations that  their top man had secretly funded Osama Bin Laden.

The first case involves  Yusuf Al-Qaradawi , a man banned from entering Britain since 2008, after advocating the abduction and killing of US soldiers in Iraq and the killing of Israeli citizens. On other matters he is  tolerant, including allowing Muslims to consume a very limited amount of alcohol . He condones wife-beating as a last resort so long as it done lightly and thinks homosexual acts should be punished by the death penalty. He was chairman of  Arcapita Shariah Advisory Board.Ironically he came to Britain in 2004 and Ken Livingstone, the Labour mayorial candidate who approved the original AssetCo contract, shared a platform at City Hall which was condemned by Bob Neill, then a London Assembly member.

The company confirm his former employment: A spokesman said: “ He was an adviser only on aspects of shari’ah law and our relationship with him ended inFebruary 2002. “

But since he has left he was had been replaced by another adviser Muhammad Taqi Usmani , a senior Pakistan Muslim scholar, and former judge who has recently advocated ” aggressive military jihad.” According to an article in The Times see http://thetim.es/pcASva- he believes Muslims should live peaceably in Britain,”  only until they gain enough power to engage in battle”. He has since corrected this impression suggesting a more ambivalent attitude to jihad.

He also as a former Pakistani sharia judge argued against the women’s protection law which made rape a criminal offence.

The company said ” We believe the report to be a mistranslation of what he actually said. He did not advocate aggressive military jihad.”

The final area involves a row in the US when Arcapita took over Cypress Communications – a company which manufactured a state of the art computer security kit. There was an allegation that the chairman of Arcapita,Mohammed Abdulaziz Aljomaih – was discovered on the ‘Golden Chain’ list of Bin Laden supporters and financiers which was seized in 2002 during an anti-terror raid in Bosnia.

There followed an inquiry by the Committee for Foreign Investment in the US  on whether the company -like the take-over of  US ports by a Dubai firm- and it ended with the company being allowed to run the company but not allowing non US national access to sensitive computer software. See:http://www.nationalcorruptionindex.org/pages/profile.php?profile_id=325

The company’s response is: “This claim was thoroughly investigated by the US authorities at the time and they found that Al Jomaih, chairman of Arcapita, was not the same person named in the list. Restrictions on non US citizens  were applied at the time, like any other foreign company buying a US company in a sensitive area , but these have since been lifted.”

The only person so far to raise this issue of Arcapita has been Matt Wrack, general secretary of the Fire Brigades Union. In a letter to Bob Neill he says: “ I am sure you will appreciate the importance of this at a time when we are still considering the outcome of the inquest into the 7/7 terror attacks.

“The simple truth is that this privatization has been a complete and utter disaster for all concerned. The complacency and lack of foresight of those responsible is an utter scandal as is the continuing attempt to pretend there is nothing wrong”.

My conclusion is that the arrangements which could lead to Arcapita taking over London’s fire brigade prove there is a major flaw in the government’s privatisation agenda .

If a firm that cannot be vetted can take over such a sensitive area- particularly as London Fire Brigade plays a major role in protecting the capital for future terrorist attacks, there is something seriously wrong.

 I cannot prove that Arcapita is not a fit and proper company to run the operational side of the London fire Brigade ( they own other less sensitive things like Freightliner and Viridian, N Ireland’s electricity). They also point out that their advisers are not employees of the company and they do not have any say in the operation of the company. Nor having just done a blog about the media misrepresenting Muslims, do I want to create scare stories.

But as a citizen I would want my elected representatives to guarantee that in such a sensitive area, they are safe to do so, and there is no hidden agenda behind this take over.

Anything less would be grossly irresponsible and playing with the lives of everybody who lives in London- whether they be Muslim, Jew, Atheist, Christian or whatever. I hope Mr Neill and Mr Coleman are listening.

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Jul
19

The unflattering media coverage of Britain’s Muslims

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Tabloid image of 2 million Muslims?: Pic: Courtesy Daily Mail

Far from me to add to journalists’  woes in the middle of the Hackgate scandal but a pretty damning book recently out gives an unflattering  picture of the media’s coverage of the Muslim community.

Pointing the Finger: Islam and Muslims in the British Media  edited by Julian Petley and Robin Richardson, chair of the Campaign for Press  and Broadcasting Freedom and ex director of the Runnymede Trust respectively (http://bit.ly/qh4TCv ) , does not make comforting reading. I discussed it  this week on Epilogue an English language arts programme put out by the Iranian state TV, Press TV(see    http://www.presstv.ir/Program/189749.html )                             ).

Much of the analysis – with one glaring exception I  am in agreement. The  book, has a wide range of contributors including my old colleague, Hugh Muir, now the Guardian’s witty diary editor. It provides a forensic analysis  showing  much  of   the media coverage of the country’s two million Muslims equates them with terrorism or extremism  or portrays Islam as a dangerous or irrational religion.

Equally damaging is a forensic examination of tabloid scare stories (both Daily Express) showing that Lambeth Council had abolished  the term Christmas lights  or a museum in the Cheddar Gorge had banned Before Christ to appease Muslims were fabrications. Worse than that, when the authorities tried to correct such ludicrous stories, they were ignored. The broadsheets were not exempt – a story claiming the Archbishop of Canterbury was backing the introduction of Sharia law for everyone -was totally misrepresented by The Times. ( he wasn’t he had raised the issue in a theological discussion distorted by that paper)

Where I part company with  the authors is their attack on John Ware who produced a controversial programme on hidden Muslim extremism in Britain for BBC’s Panorama. His main point was that leading Muslims working with the UK government on a moderate agenda were using Arabic websites to support extremism including suicide bombers. This coincides with a similar warnings from both ex Observer journalist Martin Bright and Nick Cohen, the Observer columnist.

The book gives a lame excuse for this behaviour. If the same people give different versions of their views to meet the needs of different audiences – in this case Palestine and the British domestic public - that’s all right because all politicians do it. But I am afraid it isn’t -either leading figures should tell the Palestinians they sympathise with their cause but don’t support the bombers- or tell the Brits, they do support suicide bombers in the fight against Israel. They can have their cake and eat it. And Ware was obviously right to pursue them over this.

 That aside this book is important -including fascinating interviews with Muslims who are journalists and how they were treated by their news desks -some being  “used” to infiltrate extremist groups. As one put it: “I am a professional journalist not a professional Paki”.

Given the present climate of mistrust and the concerns about society being distorted through the prism of the media, there are valuable lessons to be learned. We need more responsible  and diverse coverage or this will be another reason why the press is dying and becoming increasingly irrelevant to more and more people.

What it does not discuss is the increasingly vitriolic and unbalanced stuff in the blogosphere – from all sides. But if the media doesn’t do its job properly and spends much of its time attacking  or fabricating stories about Muslims or indeed, any other minority,  it  is playing with fire  by creating the climate for even more vicious blogs and racial tensions.

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Jul
11

Update: AssetCo stay of execution until July 25

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Update : AssetCo hearing  time and place fixed on court schedule

COURT 62
Before MR JUSTICE SALES
Monday, 25 July 2011
At half past 10

APPLICATIONS
Omniway Properties Ltd v Fairlamb
Bowman v Mellor
Monty Farms SA v Agrexco Agricultural Export Company Ltd
Monty Farms SA v Agrexco Agricultural Export Company Ltd
Dr Oetker (UK) Ltd v Kenshawnapier Ltd
Rowan & Dartington & Co Ltd v Davis

COMPANIES COURT
Medipharm Ltd
In the matter of Assetco PLC
Medpharma Ltd & Nafisa ATI
Medicentres (UK) Limited

Assetco, the near bankrupt company in charge of London and Lincolnshire’s fire engines, was given until July 25 to try to stitch up a take over deal or go bust.

Mr Justice Peter Smith  at a hearing in the Chancery Division of the High Court in London rejected moves to wind it up owing £140m  to creditors or going into administration.

The company is thought to be negotiating a deal with a Bahrain bank, Arcapita, owned by Saudis, but there is only a slim chance of the deal succeeding.

Arcapita are said to be offering just 2p a share – valuing the company at £5.77m – but already the shares had dropped to 1p at the close of trading, though after hours sales boosted it to 1.30p. Both are all time lows for the company and a statement from the firm warned “ there can be no certainty of an offer for the Company being made. “

The company is worth just £3.6m – virtually a pittance because of its huge debts.

A take over by Arcapita Bank will not be good news. Watch this space for new revelations about this firm and some disturbing stuff about AssetCo which has been sent to me by email.

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Jul
10

Too expensive to investigate Barnet Council- the auditor’s excuse

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Barnet Council " too expensive to investigate"

Paul Hughes, the auditor who refused a public interest inquiry into the appalling £1.3 m MetPro security staff scandal exposed by my fellow bloggers has rejected a further appeal for an inquiry into Barnet Council’s extraordinary inability to monitor  its own contracts properly.

Only last week his inaction was singled out by Eric Pickles, the communities secretary, in a speech to the annual conference of the Chartered Institute for Public Finance and Accountancy (CIPFA) – the big wigs of the accountancy profession – for  missing the scandal altogether when his firm Grant Thornton audited Barnet Council for a £373,000 fee. Instead Pickles praised Barnet bloggers, Mrs Angry and Mr Mustard among many others, for finding out  what Mr Hughes missed. ( see my old colleague Patrick Butler in Society Guardian).http://bit.ly/pujHys Now he says he can’t really investigate because it will be too expensive for the taxpayer.

In a letter to Andrew Dismore, the  former MP for Hendon and Labour candidate challenging Brian Coleman for the London Assembly next year, he says:

“In considering whether to undertake work in connection with a public interest report we are required to balance the additional cost top the taxpayer with the nature and scale of the issue. The relevant Audit Commission rates for the level of staff  that would be required for this are up to £380 an hour (engagement lead) and £210 per hour ( manager) and there is some risk that at a cost to the taxpayer we can only repeat what is already in, or will be in, the public domain.”

” Our view remains that the most appropriate response for the taxpayers of Barnet is to allow the council to complete its own review before committing to any detailed investigation work on our part.”

He does promise that he will not hesitate to use these powers ” in the public interest” when the oucnil reports back in September if the soon to be privatised management are not ” robust” on their response.

Not surprisingly Mr Dismore is not satisfied. He writes back that  he finds his reply   “very disappointing, as I know will many other Barnet residents. Can you please set out  in detail what steps you will be taking to “monitor the situation and assess the management and internal audit review work”.

So there is no change here. The bloggers who got MetPro need to keep Mr Hughes on his expensive toes. A reminder: his e-mail is paul.hughes@uk.gt.com.

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