It’s been known or guessed about for many months that the Tory council in Thurrock, Essex had made some pretty bad investments of public money. However the left-leaning Bureau of Investigative Journalists has done a great deal to expose the utter incompetence and waste that surrounds Thurrock council’s decision to invest over £600 million of money, borrowed from both banks and over one hundred other local authorities, into various solar energy farms across the UK.
Thanks to the excellent work done by the Bureau of Investigative Journalists, it has been revealed that hundreds of millions of pounds, approximately £200 million, of public money and borrowed money might not be able to be recouped from solar farms that may not be worth as much as at first assumed. According to the Bureau, this £200M is roughly equivalent to what Thurrock council spends on providing services to its residents in one year. I suspect that a lot of ordinary people both in Thurrock and those councils like the London Borough of Newham that have invested in these solar farms will end up suffering from reduced services due the reduced spend on these services caused by this solar farm investment scandal. Whether those in these councils who signed off this expenditure will face accountability or punishment is probably in my view less likely than the prospect of things like elderly care and other services being cut to pay for these appalling management errors.
The story published by the Bureau of Investigative Journalists is both lengthy and very detailed and I will not rehash what they’ve written but will merely link to their site below in order that readers of this blog can see it in its entirety.
After reading the Bureau’s article I’m at a loss to say definitively where the money has gone. With at least £138m and possibly much much more seemingly disappearing this is a scandal of horrific proportions. Whilst the eyes of the world are quite rightly on the multi-billion dollar crash of the cryptocurrency company FTX and which is being discussed here, here and here just to name a few places, we should not forget the scandal of Thurrock and the missing millions in public money that appears to have been spent on solar farms that might return little with regards to profit and might even leave local authorities profoundly out of pocket.
Oh come on Fahrenheit, much of the money will have ended up in the bank accounts of the great and the good plus their friends and families. This is UK after all and we plebs are only here to provide for our betters. Please don’t give the peasants ideas above their stations such as democracy or fairness etc it will only end in disconnected masses.
I agree with your cynicism but it may be libelous to say that particular chunks of money have ended up in particular places. Even the original quoted article is being careful about not saying too much tht could be seen as being libelous. However going onto the other story that I’ve linked in it which is the cryptocurrency market scandal and in particular the comment on it by Jeremy from The Quartering,there does seem to be some or rather a lot of money going to questionable end users most notably the Democratic Party in the USA. What’s not deniable i the case of the Thurrock issue is that the council have royally screwed up here.
Roy. To save you digging through the links on this piece here’s the abovementioned piece by The Quartering about the links between Sam Bankman-Freid and the Democrats here’s the direct link to the video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ihsS4xlUWTA
Your note of caution is heard and appreciated. It remains a fact in UK though that things that may be regarded as unfair or even immoral are often not illegal. I am sure a man of your background has at times been amazed how expensive lawyers can explain the law in ways you would never have thought possible.
It’s similar to how tax avoidance is not illegal but tax evasion is. If someone is being unjustly accused of something then a good lawyer is a good thing to have. Yes I have had the privilege to have seen and heard some fantastic counsel in action many of them now sadly no longer with us such as Richard Furguson QC and Michael Worsley QC. They were brilliant and conscientious defence and prosecution counsel respectively. BTW I still find it’s taking a bit of getting used to to see court stories where the counsel are KC’s rather than QC’s