A small but hugely important story has just broken. A company called Mouchel (I think it runs motorway maintenance) has just gone into administration due to the utter incompetence of the company’s executives. Helped by vultures at KPMG and Goldman Sachs (fees £18m and rising), Mouchel’s bosses are using the bank holiday weekend to close the company down, deprive shareholders of their investments and then restart the company again next week 80% owned by the company’s banks and 20% owned by the incompetent bosses who destroyed the company in the first place. The banks, KPMG, Goldman Sachs and the bosses will make millions – the stupid fools who bought shares lose everything. And those stupid fools who lost everything are you and I, because the people who owned Mouchel shares are mainly the pension funds and unit trusts where ordinary people have about £1.3trn of their savings.
This is little different to massive fraud and similar situations are occurring at many other British companies – Findus, Birds Eye, Barchester Homes, Manchestert United, Punch Taverns, MG Rover and many more – executhieves playing all kinds of financial games to make themselves and their cronies rich while looting the companies they are running. This is why only a madman or fool would buy shares in a British company today. Most are being ruined by the short-term greed of their executhieves.
And even in those companies that are surviving, their share prices go down as executhieve salaries go ever upwards, see diagram: