Letter: Utilities scandal

FOREIGN firms buying US utility companies have price increases subject to public hearings demanding disclosure of executives’ salaries and sizeable profit reinvestment.

In the UK, our useless regulators do little to control the huge salaries, inflation-busting price increases and profits exported rather than re-invested in basic infrastructure.

Soaring gas bills at Spanish-owned Scottish Power resulted in such profits it could loan £800 million to the sister company in the US, whose price increases were a tenth of ours.

The German-owned Thames Water charged UK customers twice the German cost and sent £1 billion to German shareholders but allowed three million homes’ worth of water to leak.

When the almost constant hosepipe ban resulted in seriously bad publicity the Germans simply off-loaded Thames to an Australian outfit that proceeded to asset-strip the firm.

It is a national disgrace that our feeble government is unable to protect us from the foreign owners of our key utilities who have virtually no accountability or price-rise constraint.

(Dr) John Cameron

Howard Place

St Andrews