Historical Factoids 11:

[Mal]

Well that's about half of them...............

 

 

There is one biggie left of course, Arch.

We have seen where the company derived from and equally as interesting is the way the Labour Administration at NCC turbo charged it. It was worth about £30M when they took over and for some reason they began stuffing it full of assets and an almost limitless borrowing facility with around £300M.

The way it had been set up though didn’t have any business acumen whatsoever to me. ‘Giving’ this company so much of our assets and lending it money at favourable interest rates, like it was going out of style, with only the obligation of paying interest on the actual money it received meant it’s never going to repay the original balances. At some point in the future it will have to clear those balances or refinance?

BTW, NCC makes the spread between what they can borrow at, which is well below bank rates, and the interest rate they charge Arch. So at least there is a little tickle!

However ramping up the company to the levels it reached and saying they wanted to triple that ‘investment’ was and is a recipe for disaster! I said that on my first election leaflet! That has now been recognised and is being dealt with, hopefully!

It was also supposed to pay back cash dividends to NCC as its sole owner. I did see one such payment made to Active Northumberland at the time (£1M) , because Active was itself heading for financial disaster due to mismanagement under the same people.

We all read the ‘indiscretions’ the Arch report noted, nepotism, financial irregularities, no proper controls in place etc, etc, etc. The final report was quite damming with all sorts of shenanigans mentioned, such as the Chief Executive selling his house at an inflated price to the company because he couldn’t sell it on the open market! How on earth there were no prosecutions bewilders me, but it’s hardly surprising the level of mistrust the general public have for politicians.

I really don’t understand why any politician who is elected at set periods in time, so can be kicked out and lose all the control they might have, would dare to act in the way some of these people did and to allow such a ridiculous state of affairs. They must have realised it was all going to come out pretty quickly, all that needed to happen was to lose the next election, which they did, and that lit the fuse. Thank God it did or we might be in the same position as the other councils across the country declaring bankruptcy.

The thing that really gets my goat is they while all this was going on, basically profligacy with public money behind the scenes; we saw cuts to NCC budgets like Adult Services and Children’s Services. I really don’t know how some people sleep on a night!

[Canny lass]

I've just spent a pleasant half hour in the company of one of my 'bonus' grandsons who has read out loud to me Historical Factoids 1 - 11. We've laughed and cried in equal amounts. Thank you Malcolm!! One thing he said to me was "lt sounds just like you when when you're really peed off with people's ineptitude" (my translation). I'll take that as a complement!!