The Sunday Times agrees with me – the energy companies are ‘having a laugh’ – at our expense

A few days ago, most of the mainstream media went into paroxysms of delight as they announced that the £79m a year Ofgem had asked another regulator – the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) – to investigate the energy market. On this blog, I tried to point out that this was merely a delaying tactic by the useless £79m a year Ofgem as the CMA study would take about 2 to 3 years and that in reality it was the £79m a  year Ofgem’s job to regulate the market.

Finally, one newspaper seems to have realised the truth. Under the title “Pull the plug on Ofgem – nobody will notice” one Sunday Times journalist wrote “The is as abject a capitulation by a regulator as can be imagined”. The article then went on “Ofgem’s job is to police energy companies and look after the public interest”.

On my blog yesterday, I laid out (hopefully clearly) how the Big Six energy companies have repeatedly lied to us and fleeced us for years. Today, I’ll provide a little bit more information to reinforce my argument that the energy companies, ably assisted by the supposed regulator Ofgem, are having a laugh at our expense.

As I explained yesterday, the energy companies claim they have low profit margins of 4% to 5%. But this is just on supplying gas and electricity to households. The companies deliberately keep these profit margins low so they don’t appear to be fleecing us. Where they make the big money is on generating power or extracting gas which they then sell to themselves at vastly inflated prices. Here are just a few 2012 profit margins I managed to find:

And we could also look at the dividends the energy companies paid their owners – often foreign companies. It’s difficult to find good figures as many of the energy companies lend themselves hundreds of millions at artificial rates of interest to hide their profits and reduce their tax liabilities. But here are the significant increases in dividends from 2009 to 2012 for three companies where I could get reasonably reliable figures:

The energy companies are taking us to the cleaners and there’s nothing either our politicians or our regulators are doing about it as they’re in the pockets of the Big Six energy companies.

By the way, my latest book “DON’T BUY IT!” is now available on Amazon in either paperback or Kindle – it would be great if a few people could show some support for this website by buying a few copies for themselves, friends and family.