Snippets and gleanings - business update

Your post is in the Czech
News agency, Reuters, reports that the owner of Royal Mail has agreed to a £3.57billion takeover by Czech billionaire, Daniel Kretinsky.  Founded by Henry VIII in 1513 purely for royal mail, it was opened up to public use by Charles I in 1635 and sold off in a government asset strip - sorry, privatisation - in 2013, when the Post Office was also split off as a separate entity - and that ended well didn't it? Just ask Paula Vennells. On second thoughts, don't bother - she was paid over 5 million quid of public money not to know what was going on.

Fit to bust
Meanwhile, City AM reports that Thames Water, the embattled (f)utilities outfit currently losing more than 600million litres of water per day and pumping more than 72billion litres of untreated sewage into the Thames since 2020, has won an innovation award run by the regulator, Of(t)wat. Thames Water will receive £16.9million “to examine how technologies like robotics and trenchless repair methods could help fix leaks in the future without the need to dig trenches and all the associated disruption this causes.” Better late than never I guess. Shareholder dividends have totalled more than £200million over the last five years while the combined debt now stands at around £14.7billion. Guess who's likely to pick up the tab for that little lot.

Virgin on the ridiculous
The BBC (still in public ownership last time I looked) reports that Virgin Trains could return to running rail services on the West Coast route between London and Glasgow five years after losing the franchise. It means that Virgin would be competing with Avanti West Coast, the train company it lost the contract to in 2019. Virgin Group confirmed that it had applied to the Office of Rail and Road, the regulator, for an Open Access licence. Under this type of licence, a firm receives no state subsidies and takes on the risk of running a rail service itself. In contrast, a franchised operator, such as Avanti, holds a contract with the government to run the route. A spokesperson for Virgin Group said: "While this application is just the first step towards exploring what might be possible, we think Open Access is the way forward". In other words Richard Branson has spotted another licence to print money.










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