SW is about to have its arse sued because of a massive data breach.
Reward for failure.
Addolff
8 months ago
That’s right, give barrow loads of peoples* money to the government and lawyers. It’s just another form of tax isn’t it?
*The employees, shareholders, customers etc.
p.s. They announced a £48 million loss after tax for the last financial year…….
jgh
8 months ago
How on earth do you have a loss *after* tax? Tax is levied on your profits, and is a fraction of your profits, so if you’ve made a pre-tax profit, you have a post-tax profit. You can only have a “post tax” loss if you made a pre-tax loss, in which case there’s no tax to pay as there’s no profits, so it’s just a plain normal *pretax* loss and the tax has nothing to do with it.
dcardno
8 months ago
You still book a tax provision, jgh – in this case, for the value of the future recovery when you carry this loss forward to offset next year’s pre-tax profit. Subject to rules about the likelihood of their being a profit in the subsequent years, of course.
MJW
8 months ago
If this is a reward for performance, it would be staggering to see what this guy would get if the company wasn’t a basket case reliant on bailouts to prop-up the weight of financially engineered debts.
Southerner
8 months ago
“There is no connection between high executive pay and company performance (well, there is – the wider the pay differentials, the lower the commitment of the less well paid).” ~ Stanford professors Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert Sutton.
OK it’s from The Guardian, so take it with a few milligrams of NaCl:
@ jgh
The rules that the CFO and auditor apply to define profit are not the same as those the taxman applies – and if the company makes a profit in country A but a larger loss in country B it will still pay tax even though it makes a loss before tax.
If you look at your tax return notes you will see that there are several categories of income and in most cases you cannot offset losses in one category against profits in another (an extreme case is Labour’s vindictive vendetta against private landlords where not only can no losses from anywhere be used to offset profits from lettings – and vice versa – but capital profits/losses on the final sale cannot be offset by or be offset trading losses or profits on letting).
Contrary to commonsense it is possible to pay tax in excess of pre-tax profits and even pay tax despite having pre-tax losses.
New Man
8 months ago
I read South of England people drink the same water that has passed through seven people. LOL. Yuck.
Takes a new meaning to term taking the ….
Ducky McDuckface
8 months ago
Came across an interesting thing recently, Guido sort of has it today, also Politico, but directly from the EA, once the Cunliffe Report hits Monday, OfWat’s dead in the water. As it were.
Most likely down to overflow and pollution issues as the sensor network is being built out (there’s a commentor here who provided a link to the website, maybe last year?), which will be the headline take.
But, it seems that from a capture angle, OfWat has been seriously compromised for years, decades.
Interesting, we’ll see what happens. But the EA appears to have been busy with requests from the SoS over the tail end of this week.
Great. Who are they going to get? Who has clean hands and knows anything about the sector? Go on, tell me the quangocracy isn’t going to get the gig this time.
Charles
8 months ago
@New Man – “I read South of England people drink the same water that has passed through seven people.”
That’s totally shocking. Surely it’s far, far more than that? While some water undergoes chemical transformations in animals and plants, I would have expected that the vast majority of rain is the same water which evaporated after falling as previous rain, so water could easily have passed through people a thousand years ago and appear out of a tap today.
john77
8 months ago
OfWat has banned bonuses for various English water companies because there were 2801 pollution incidents across all water companies in England in 2024. Scottish Water only monitors 3.4% of sewage outlets so published data understates the problem – outside estimates are that there are 10,000 pollution incidents a year(the Marine Conservation Society’s analysis concluded there were 14,000 in 2022, five times the number for England. England has more than 12 times the population of Scotland – so the state-owned company is SIXTY times as bad as the private ones
SW is about to have its arse sued because of a massive data breach.
Reward for failure.
That’s right, give barrow loads of peoples* money to the government and lawyers. It’s just another form of tax isn’t it?
*The employees, shareholders, customers etc.
p.s. They announced a £48 million loss after tax for the last financial year…….
How on earth do you have a loss *after* tax? Tax is levied on your profits, and is a fraction of your profits, so if you’ve made a pre-tax profit, you have a post-tax profit. You can only have a “post tax” loss if you made a pre-tax loss, in which case there’s no tax to pay as there’s no profits, so it’s just a plain normal *pretax* loss and the tax has nothing to do with it.
You still book a tax provision, jgh – in this case, for the value of the future recovery when you carry this loss forward to offset next year’s pre-tax profit. Subject to rules about the likelihood of their being a profit in the subsequent years, of course.
If this is a reward for performance, it would be staggering to see what this guy would get if the company wasn’t a basket case reliant on bailouts to prop-up the weight of financially engineered debts.
“There is no connection between high executive pay and company performance (well, there is – the wider the pay differentials, the lower the commitment of the less well paid).” ~ Stanford professors Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert Sutton.
OK it’s from The Guardian, so take it with a few milligrams of NaCl:
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2006/mar/12/theobserver.observerbusiness5
@ jgh
The rules that the CFO and auditor apply to define profit are not the same as those the taxman applies – and if the company makes a profit in country A but a larger loss in country B it will still pay tax even though it makes a loss before tax.
If you look at your tax return notes you will see that there are several categories of income and in most cases you cannot offset losses in one category against profits in another (an extreme case is Labour’s vindictive vendetta against private landlords where not only can no losses from anywhere be used to offset profits from lettings – and vice versa – but capital profits/losses on the final sale cannot be offset by or be offset trading losses or profits on letting).
Contrary to commonsense it is possible to pay tax in excess of pre-tax profits and even pay tax despite having pre-tax losses.
I read South of England people drink the same water that has passed through seven people. LOL. Yuck.
Takes a new meaning to term taking the ….
Came across an interesting thing recently, Guido sort of has it today, also Politico, but directly from the EA, once the Cunliffe Report hits Monday, OfWat’s dead in the water. As it were.
Most likely down to overflow and pollution issues as the sensor network is being built out (there’s a commentor here who provided a link to the website, maybe last year?), which will be the headline take.
But, it seems that from a capture angle, OfWat has been seriously compromised for years, decades.
Interesting, we’ll see what happens. But the EA appears to have been busy with requests from the SoS over the tail end of this week.
https://archive.ph/kZdhd
Great. Who are they going to get? Who has clean hands and knows anything about the sector? Go on, tell me the quangocracy isn’t going to get the gig this time.
@New Man – “I read South of England people drink the same water that has passed through seven people.”
That’s totally shocking. Surely it’s far, far more than that? While some water undergoes chemical transformations in animals and plants, I would have expected that the vast majority of rain is the same water which evaporated after falling as previous rain, so water could easily have passed through people a thousand years ago and appear out of a tap today.
OfWat has banned bonuses for various English water companies because there were 2801 pollution incidents across all water companies in England in 2024. Scottish Water only monitors 3.4% of sewage outlets so published data understates the problem – outside estimates are that there are 10,000 pollution incidents a year(the Marine Conservation Society’s analysis concluded there were 14,000 in 2022, five times the number for England. England has more than 12 times the population of Scotland – so the state-owned company is SIXTY times as bad as the private ones