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‘Few
things are more agreeable than seeing your neighbour fall off his roof……..’
At
PMQs, Miliband called Cameron a ‘dunce’ over the Royal Mail sell-off. Cameron
called Miliband a ‘Muppet’ for Brown’s sale of half Britain’s gold reserves at the
fire-sale price of $275/oz. (around $1300 today) losing between $5 bn (Treasury
figure) and $9 bn (Daily Mail). Just a normal Wednesday in the Commons, then.
But
the scandal of the Royal Mail deserves far more investigation than a
yah-boo-sucks exchange between Ed and Dave.
After
the outburst of self-congratulation by the Government on the privatisation of
Royal Mail, it now turns out to be a lash-up. Not for the City gents who have
made millions, of course The first-day profit after the IPO was £750,000,000. But
certainly for the British people; at least the posties made something out of it.
The
split was 30% retained by Government, 10% allocated to Royal Mail staff and 60%
to the IPO. There were 17 ‘priority investors’ who were given a special price
of 260p in return for a promise to hold onto the shares in the interests of ‘stability’.
They quickly reneged on this, and about half were sold soon after the launch. The
share price rose to 615p (currently around 560p).
So
who were these priority investors, the privileged and fortunate few who made a killing
out of the UK taxpayer? How many shares did they get at this knock-down price? How
much profit did they make? The Government refuses to tell us.
It
could have been avoided if the Government had followed Margaret Thatcher’s ‘Tell
Sid!’ approach, allowing ordinary people to buy a limited number of shares at a
fixed price in advance of the IPO as part of her ‘property-owning democracy’ philosophy
that would create an entirely new class of shareholders. But that was before
politics became the exclusive preserve of the metropolitan elites.
Who
is the architect of this shambles? Step forward the egregious Cable. He must surely be due for
an early bath.
Truly,
after hubris comes nemesis.
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