The warning could not be starker. As things stand today Thames Water, a £20 billion company supplying a quarter of the British population including its capital, its King and its Prime Minister, will run out of money on March 24. From that date, little more than 70 days away, our biggest drinking water and sewerage business will be unable to service its £16 billion of debts — or pay its suppliers.
Thames will be in default on its borrowings, and its workers and contractors will have to down tools on essential work on its network of 32,000km of water mains and 109,000km of sewers, and hundreds of waste water treatment sites. In the ugly but, in this case, strangely apposite phrase so beloved of the financial services, Thames Water is perilously close to the end of its “liquidity runway”.
This bleak scenario is laid out in the legal documents lodged with the High Court last month as Thames Water bosses and advisers scrambled to put together an emergency funding package that buys it enough time to raise more money from investors and, finally, put itself on a sustainable financial footing.
With lawyerly understatement the court documents rightly conclude that without the deal, a default will “pose a number of significant risks for the Thames Water Group’s business, its customers and the environment as well as regulatory risks for TWUL (Thames Water Utilities Ltd) and its directors”.
In other words we will all be deep in the brown stuff that it is Thames Water’s job to clean up 365 days of the year.
Bu hikaye The London Standard dergisinin January 09, 2025 sayısından alınmıştır.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 9,000+ magazines and newspapers.
Already a subscriber ? Giriş Yap
Bu hikaye The London Standard dergisinin January 09, 2025 sayısından alınmıştır.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 9,000+ magazines and newspapers.
Already a subscriber? Giriş Yap
Who is to blame for the lack of elite English managers?
Replacing Tuchel with a homegrown candidate will be no easy task
Who your club will sign and sell in the January market
Kolo Muani has more than one interested club in London, while there are big names unsettled and looking to move
The debt disaster threatening to leave Londoners without a drop to drink
Crisis-hit Thames Water could go under in days
Is 2025 the year of the first-time buyer?
This could be your best chance to buy a home in more than a decade here's where to look
Kick back in the Caribbean BodyHoliday, Saint Lucia
Green juices, beach workouts and supercharged facials: more and more of us are swapping piña coladas and indulgent food for a healthier, but no less glamorous, holiday.
Dishoom's Kavi Thakraron why Mumbai is his inspiration
The best street food, fantastic markets and bars where the hours just disappear...the restaurateur shares his guide
On the sauce - Adiamondis forever, after all
Double Diamond was supposedly Prince Philip’s favourite beer. He’s said to have enjoyed a bottle, nightly.
At the table - Queen of W1 expands empire with chic Italian
I understand it's not the done thing to compare restaurateurs to murderous mob bosses, given it's rude and, well, they're notoriously litigious. But when I think of Samyukta Nair, sometimes I hear Jack Nicholson's mutterings in The Departed, Martin Scorsese's Boston gangster flick. \"I don't want to be a product of my environment,\" Nichol- son says. \"I want my environment to be a product of me.\"
The Royal Academy's masterful show and mind-expanding surrealist paintings
Known for his intricate and stunning handmade tapestries, Siributr creates these vast hangings to explore his native Thailand past and present.
Review - Adrien Brody's power and depth shine in this colossal epic
The Brutalist, director Brady Corbet’s third feature, is a movie of such colossal size and scope it may well have been carved from marble; an epic paean to the immigrant experience in America in the wake of the Second World War.
