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Friday, 18 November 2011

Not just the heirs to Blair

Nope, the Cobbleition is also a proud wearer of the Crown of Brown.

UK Financial Investments said it has agreed to sell 100pc of Northern Rock to Virgin Money for £747m in cash immediately, but this could potentially rise to around £1bn.
Under the deal, another £50m is “expected” to be paid within six months. The Treasury will also benefit by up to £80m if the bank floats in the next five years and retain £150m of Tier 1 capital notes.
Northern Rock, which signalled the start of the financial crisis in Britain when it collapsed in August 2007, is the first bank to be returned to the private sector.
The Newcastle-based lender received a £1.4bn bail-out when it was nationalised in February 2008 at the height of the credit crunch. So on paper, taxpayers end up with a loss of £400m, but this could rise to £650m.
Marvellous. Just fucking marvellous. Memo to Gordon Clown, and of course also to his blinky pet Ed Balls who sadly did quite not lose his seat in the election:

This is why you should have let Northern fucking Rock go to the wall,
you witless pair of financially incompetent cunts.

Happily for them, though miserably for everyone else, they're not alone.
George Osborne said the deal was a “good thing” for taxpayers, consumers and the banking system.
Did he say that? Did he really fucking say that? The Chumpcellor of the fucking Exchequer thinks that losing nearly half a billion quid, and possibly as much as two thirds of a billion, is a good thing. Has Gordon Brown got his fist up George's arse and is making his mouth move or something? That's got to be the most retarded thing to come out of the mouth of the finance minister of an industrialised nation since some fucktroon decided to sell nearly 400 tons of gold near a long term low in its value, and then fucking announce it in advance so the price fell even further. Oh, and that was a British one too, wasn't it? Come to think of it, it was... well, we all know only too well, don't we?

And although it wasn't quite on the scale of the billions and billions Gordon flushed away when he dumped gold at a historic low, which his mouth may well have helped make lower, Boy Georgie thinks it was a good thing for taxpayers to lose another half billion or so. Yes, the Cobbleition inherited the situation, and yes, it was Gordon, his badger faced sock puppet and Ed Bollocks who made the incredibly bad decision to bail out a bank that deserved to fail rather than just make sure of the investors' statutory protection. And yes, in that position you have to take the best offer you're going to get, and this is probably better than it might have been. But to have the new-ish Chumpcellor stand there saying it's anything than the loss of another half a billion pounds, perhaps more, is anything other than a colossal fuckup due entirely to the headless chicken panic response of the previous government is at best not very politically astute and at worst an indication that he's every bit as fucking stupid as they were.

And of course it's not over yet because only the good bit of Northern Rock was sold, which is presumably why they only got £747m for it. Oh, no what we can still think of as Northern Wreck is still there. And it's got company.
In January last year the company was split into a “good bank”, which Virgin has bought, and Northern Rock Asset Management, the “bad bank” of closed mortgages and unsecured loans which remain in Government ownership.
[...]
As well as Northern Rock’s “bad bank”, UKFI still owns Royal Bank of Scotland, Lloyds Banking Group and Bradford & Bingley.
And I don't doubt that if or when RBS, Lloyds Group and B&B are sold back into the private sector at a further loss to the taxpayers Georgie Lame will say that's a good thing too. It's good that it's over, but in all other respects it's hard to find anything good to say about the taxpayers having to drop their trousers and grip their ankles yet again because the fucking Treasury (along with most or all of the rest of government) has got next to no fucking clue how to spend money wisely and thinks there's an inexhaustible supply of it.

Jesus Christ on a borrowed bicycle, the place is fucking doomed.

Comments (12)

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"And although it wasn't quite on the scale of the billions and billions Gordon flushed away when he dumped gold at a historic low..."

Sadly, I suspect that's through lack of opportunity, not any innate intelligence...
1 reply · active 697 weeks ago
I'm curious at how the Beardy One got the dosh - it wasn't in the teapot on the mantlepiece that's for certain.

Branson connives certain amounts of commercial sock puppetry for the use of the Virgin brand and it is not clear at all here that he's buying it with his own money...... Umm... perhaps he borrowed the money from a Greek oligarch sailing/flying pal ?

I mean... did he pay in Sterling?

More to this than meets the eye I reckon.
3 replies · active 696 weeks ago
Interesting question but if he's not got a loan from the government it's his problem and that of Virgin shareholders.
I'm not sure - but isn't Virgin a privately held company these days?- i.e only Beardy and chiums/family as in no shares on the Stock Exchange and therefore nil requirement to publish much in the way of accounts?

I bet that smug chimp Adam Applegarth is still swanning around in his Aston.....

bankers....
Oooh, you've got me wondering now. I'm sure I've seen Virgin shares on the Australian Stock Exchange. I'll go check.

/checks... /

Looks like some things under the Virgin brand are publicly traded and some things aren't. Virgin Blue, his upside down airline, is indeed traded on the ASX and Virgin Media is on NASDAQ, and that's about as far as I checked because other parts do seem to be held privately as you said. Whether Virgin Money is one of the former or the latter I didn't see, but assuming not then it's not the non-existent shareholders' problem but just Beardy's himself.
I do like a good "told you so!"

check it out
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/b...
3 replies · active 696 weeks ago
Good find. Beardy's problem then, and Wilbur Ross' if things go pear shaped again. But I suspect they did a rather better job of due diligence before handing over the money than the government did when they nationalised Northern Wreck.
As far as Virgin is concerned - a number of outfits have Virgin as a (sometimes very small) minority shareholder and use the branding - generally to disguise poorly perceived old brand - like Virgin Media which is essentially NTHell and is going the same way as the old NTL for largely the same reasons.... The core Virgin vehicle is privately held and there's a web of offshore-ing in there somewhere too.

As far as the bank is concerned - the prudent thing to do is to write off the utterly idiotic debts run up by the gitwad Applegarth and his clueless crew (ta very much UK taxpayers) - leaving a core of "can pay , will pay eventually" debts. I haven't checked out the balance sheet - but if I were a betting man I'd reckon that Rich 'n Wilbur have bought the remanent "debt" for about 10p in the pound...... - a reasonably sound crew of footsoldiers, high street locations and a UK banking licence - neat manouver = Beardy does have an eye for a deal......
I'd say you're right. It did mention that the Rock was split into a 'good' bank and a 'bad' bank, and we don't need to guess which one they bought because it said the 'bad' bank is still owned by UKFI, which seems like a fancy way of saying that the British taxpayers are still on the hook for it.
Yeah... so the story should actually be "Branson and chums buy worthwhile bits of Northern Crock and taxpayer stuffed for all bad debts " = thanks very much HM Treasury......

I do wonder if git Applegarth (or any of the previous shareholders) has any remnant interest financially in the bank and if so.... which bit have they got?
1 reply · active 696 weeks ago
That's it in a nutshell. Which bit the last lot have certainly got is "away with it". But then we knew that would happen when the bailouts occurred. Like RBS the bank should have failed and it didn't, and since Gordo's government was too busy making sure it didn't in the case of RBS to check Fred Goodwin's pension arrangements I wouldn't be at all surprised if there are similar stories wrt the Rock. Mind you, the current lot have just proved they're every bit as bad.

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