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Comment on Water firms ask for bill rises of between 24% and 91%

thr0w4w4y2@sh.itjust.works ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

would love to but where does the money come from to buy out all the shareholders? you would need to raise tens of billions - remember we just spent £10bn to give people a 1% tax cut

and before you say “fuck the shareholders,” remember that lots of them are your pension fund

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IchNichtenLichten@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
You pass legislation to make the company unprofitable by making it fulfill it’s obligation to invest in infrastructure to the point where the funds run for the hills.

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- thr0w4w4y2@sh.itjust.works ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  so the shareholders pull their funds, the water companies struggle and the taxpayer has to step in to bail them out.
  
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  - IchNichtenLichten@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Bail them out? Nah, make it publicly owned.
    
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    thr0w4w4y2@sh.itjust.works ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    yes that would be awesome, but the problem is that “make it publicly owned” means “buy out their shares” which is giving them a bailout, plus “service all the debt the company is in” which is another bailout, before you’ve even got started with fixing the horrible lack of investment over many years
    
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GreatAlbatross@feddit.uk ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
It shouldn’t be “lump it on the tax payers” or “we can’t do anything, because innocent pension holders may lose out”.
It’s like the bad guy in the movie holding a hostage so they don’t get shot. The haircuts should be extracted from the people responsible: The funds that felt it was appropriate to include asset stripping of public utilities in general pension funds, and the executives they put in place/votes they cast at AGMs to make it happen. If that means that general pension funds fall, the victims should be going after the ones who did it, not the poor bastards having their water bills doubled, or having the cost of bailing out heaped on their government.

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- thr0w4w4y2@sh.itjust.works ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  I’d like it to go that way too but realistically, no government in the world is going to go after a massive hedge fund or investment bank for failing to stop a company asset stripping a public utility for profit.
  
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