Evil Diaries: Silly Season
This sustained dry weather has just broken and offered to me and my wife, for the first time in decades, the divine sweet smell of the onset of the rainy season which we first encountered fifty-five years ago in Central Africa.
A rather less pleasant smell has been that of politicians scrabbling around for plausible poses as these last mad days of our having no prime minister play out.
The silliest has been Starmer who purports to think he can nick money off “energy” companies in a “windfall” tax. Well, this is populist rubbish which has not been costed and put in context. I note that Kwasi Kwarteng of BEIS is not so foolish as to have proposed any such comparable garbage. I am no expert on parliamentary procedure but there would be the small problem of a hybrid bill in point. Starmer, being a lawyer, knows this but his purpose is to deceive not to inform.
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Easily the best way to raise the vast sum of additional tax now required is by taking second mortgages on all property based on the value thereof. That would make the people squeak. But it would raise money.
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The Taliban want the $9bn held by in effect the Americans in the interests of Afghanistan so that The Taliban can extend their policy of pointless murder. Even assuming that The Taliban have a claim (I doubt it) there seems to a good case not to pay them.
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I suspect that all businesses based on the internet nowadays (that is virtually all businesses) make a point in recruiting CEOs who specialise in buggering up the customers knowing full well that the customers cannot effectively complain.
I have a long list of these so and so CEOs. In the short term one should wherever it is convenient decline to extend credit to these businesses. Longer term parliamentary action may be required. In the meantime would Amazon kindly return to me the £240 odd they nicked off my credit card by way of introducing me to Prime – which I do not want?
I am having roughly similar trouble with Virgin Group Media. It’s so tiresome.
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Some clots think the management of Victoria (VCP) are doing a tremendous job for all shareholders by buying in stock. However the clots ought to know who is selling before feeling cheered.
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Finally, Pantheon Resources seems to be going from strength to strength. This morning’s drilling news has taken the price up to 136p with two brokers proposing a target price of the order of 300p.
Some of the biggest parisites are the directors of Utilities who pay themselves obscene bonuses for not fixing leaks and tipping sewage into the sea.
Surely a simple Act of Parliament could be introduced to limit these abuses.
No these industries are already regulated.
As for ceos collecting to much for doing a sht job, yes may be its time for shareholders to demand more power. I can think of several ceos who have managed to run companies into the ground only to be taken over and yet cling on to thier job! How can that be? Consulting is the worst of all. They secure smaller and smaller margins producing more and more risk for share holders but somehow get higher and higher salaries.
You might like to Google “Thomas Quentin Crimp”, a character in “Old Harry’s Game”. He was claimed to be the most venal human ever to have lived, and to have been the chairman of a privatised water company…