2023-07-13 17:30:52
The vertiginous rise in interest rates has caused the cost of Thames Water’s debt to explode and the environmental damage for which it is responsible led to the resignation of its CEO at the end of June. BEN STANSALL/AFP
The British Conservative government is considering nationalizing the over-indebted water company.
London
£14bn (€16.4bn) debt, gigantic leaks and millions of liters of sewage dumped into rivers each year: Thames Water, the private company supplying water to 15 million of Britons in London and the South East of England, does not take half measures. This calamitous management of water and its finances, which has lasted for several decades, has finally caught up with the giant of the sector across the Channel. The vertiginous rise in interest rates has caused the cost of its debt to explode and the environmental damage for which it is responsible led to the resignation at the end of June of its CEO, Sarah Bentley.
Times are so serious for Thames Water that the Conservative government of Rishi Sunak is studying the possibility of renationalizing the company, a choice that is nevertheless light years away from its very liberal ideology, and against the decision taken in 1989 by Margaret Thatcher to privatize water distribution.
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