daily mail – Robert Bischof

This article was published in the Daily Mail on 7 August 2013

The sale of Invensys, one of the last remaining substantial engineering companies in the UK, to the French industrial giant Schneider Electric simply beggars belief.

The declared aim of this Government is to rebalance the economy towards manufacturing. In reality short-term shareholder value rules and the Brits will sell anything and everything to please the City.

As a German living in this country, I am aghast at this. Germany’s manufacturing prowess is founded on a much more long-termist approach. But Invensys is, sadly, a typical British industrial story.

The company was created out of the merger of two engineering companies Siebe and BTR in 1999. The new company was debt-laden and poorly managed, going through a £2.7billion debt restructuring exercise in 2004. In 2005 the board appointed Ulf Henriksson as chief executive, who restored the company to financial health. Enter Sir Nigel Rudd as new chairman.

In March 2011 he fired Henriksson, an engineer, because ‘he could not see the big picture’ and replaced him with the chief financial officer Wayne Edmunds. The share price subsequently halved in 2012 because of technical problems. It only bounced back when the break-up of the company was announced and set in motion with the sale of the signalling business to Siemens.

The rest is now on its way to being swallowed by a French company for £3.4billion – well done, Sir Nigel. Does anybody get the message that these deals are a sure way to manufacturing oblivion in the UK?

My own experience bears this out. I arrived in the UK 40 years ago to set up a UK subsidiary of a German lift truck maker. Our main European rival was the British company Lansing Bagnall, based in Basingstoke. Their market share in the UK was around 45 per cent and they exported 60 per cent of their production worldwide. They were the envy of the industry.

Some 20 years later a large German industrial conglomerate bought them. A few years later they were sold on with the rest of the lift truck division to private equity, who closed the Basingstoke factory and moved the production to Germany and France.

In 1994 my company bought the last remaining British lift truck manufacturer Lancer Boss, invested huge sums for a while, but then had to give up, close the plant in Leighton Buzzard and moved the production to Germany.

One of the reasons was that they could no longer get cold-rolled steel sections for the lift masts of their trucks in the UK, as the Corus plant in the North East was ‘restructured’ – the other was that there was a cyclical downturn in the sector.

There are dozens of industries and companies where the same or similar happened. Mergers, acquisitions, de-mergers and break-ups of companies are a favourite game in the UK to enhance so-called shareholder value. It promises faster returns for shareholders and bonuses for the board members rather than following the slower path of growing their companies organically. They would rather ‘return cash to the shareholders’ by share buy-back programmes and high dividends than invest in the future of their businesses and the prosperity of UK Plc.

What is the Government doing to change this pattern? The slogan needs to change from ‘It’s the economy, stupid’ to ‘It’s the real economy, stupid.’

Published 23 Jan 2012, Daily Mail, Letters to the Editor

Sir

James Coney in the Money Mail 18^th January 2012 (“Banks can easily fix this flawed system”) highlights rightly the fact that the system is geared towards “the vulnerable paying for the better off”.

However, this is only the tip of the iceberg. Banks, Credit Card and Store Card operators, Mail Order companies and worst of all loan sharks and those known by a camouflaged name, the so-called Pay-Day loan providers all work on a similar principle. They can afford to lend money out indiscriminately at exorbitant rates, as these include provisions for defaulting customers: The higher the risk, the higher the interest rate. They are exploiting the socially weak and uneducated by luring them often into spending money they do not have and in the most expensive way. Frequently they are driven deeper into debt and in the end it is invariably the state that has to pick up the pieces with social welfare support. It is a disgrace of the first order and one of the reasons for British private household debt to stand at 1.5 trillion.

The Mail has often been critical of European ways – I wished it could break with this tradition and start a campaign to outlawing this practice of exploiting the weakest group in society. Countries like Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland have tough usury laws to protect this most vulnerable group. There any contract or deal that carries interest rates above 18-20% pa are nil and void and unenforceable in court. Repeated offenders can be imprisoned. It is noticeable that the above mentioned countries are also those doing reasonably well in the present economic climate.

As this proposal would put half of Britain’s financial services operators behind bars, a law like this would have to be introduced over time and with decreasing rates starting maybe with 30%, which put at least an immediate end to the horrible loan sharks.

Bob Bischof

Tag: daily mail

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