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[andrewducker]

1. PFI 'buy back' deals to cost taxpayer millions

(tags:Scotland finance OhForFucksSake )

Comments

[hairyears]

So we're waking-up, at last, to the reality of PFI contracts: they are so disadvantageous - inequitable, even - that they constitute legitimised corruption.

Not just the extortionate costs of a debt-like financial obligation that bleeds public services white: but the expropriation of public assets that must now be 'bought' back at market prices far exceeding the capital resources of a hollowed-out nation.

We can, of course, borrow even more money to buy back these assets: will this be possible without similar 'off-balance-sheet' financial engineering that we'll all pretend not to see as public-sector borrowing?

Listen carefully for hollow laughter in the developing world, where this kind of corrupt expropriation superseded onerous debt in the 1990's and ask yourself: is it really so surprising, that the economic methods of colonialism and post-colonialism work against 'us', too?


The final word is that someone else in laughing, too: someone profited from all this.

Who said it was all 'legal' and why should we not expropriate them, and reclaim the public assets that we have paid for, over and over and over again?

[bens_dad]

The contracts with "buy back" clauses were among the first wave of PFI deals signed by Tony Blair's Labour government.

Most subsequent private finance deals did not include this type of clause.


So *this* issue is that their lawyers were better than our lawyers.

I am reminded again of the Yes (Prime)Minister episode where Sir Humphrey is found out for having (decades before) leased land in Scotland for the State and failed to notice that Scots law does not require the owner to compensate the lessee for improvements (very usable buildings IIRC).

I do wish we used the German accounting system where infrastructure investment is counted as an asset. That way the balance sheet would show the borrowing balanced by the regained assets.

It works the other way too. Recent Tories reduced the National Debt by buying back war bonds which were a) interest free, and b) heavily discounted as they were essentially bad debt. The bottom line looked a lot better but we essentially threw a (comparatively small) lump of money to speculators and only got a warm fuzzy feeling in return.

[cellio]

[andrewducker]

That's what I get for not double checking my work!