Electrical utilities should be publicly run because they are a basic service to the public and should not be ginned up by a bank or a hedge fund in order to put money into the coffers of private equity firms designated for increasing executive pay.
It has to be said again and again: Goldman Sachs is not interested in the welfare of the public: it is ONLY interested in its own money-making projects.
Here's a sad story of an energy company being scalped by public equity fees and, apparently, by bad advice:
§ First, find a public utility that needs money;
§Next, change its name from TXU Corp which supplies electricity to homes to Energy Future Holding Corp which can be milked for fees;
Use deregulation to
§ Leverage the hell out of the company so that it becomes insolvent or bankrupt;
§ Pay no attention to making the company work well;
§ Obtain scandalously high fees ("25 times greater than average") for the hedgies and for Goldman;
§ Buy shares in the utility to obtain control;
§ Make the structure of the utility so complex that it cannot be easily penetrated;
§ Make sure derivatives traders get a crack at the carcass of the former public utility company;
§ Extract all profit and decrease the value of the now skeletal company.
All these actions are probably legal but they stink to high heaven! What kind of economy can be built on such stuff?
Yes, Goldman Sachs, you are a prime example of how to manage debt--but only for your own benefit. You are a predatory bank extracting wealth from the needs of the public. Of course, Andrea Raphael of Goldman Sachs is too ashamed to comment on the following article, and Shame on Goldman Sachs!
Banks should be run like utilities;
Utilities should not be run by banks.
TXU Teeters as KKR et al. Reap $528 Million in Fees. . . .KKR, TPG Capital and Goldman Sachs took an $8.3 billion equity stake in Energy Future, according to a 2008 regulatory filing.
Fees and debt-funded dividends are among the ways private- equity firms can profit from a holding without actually improving the value of a target beyond its buyout price. Debt issued to fund such dividends, known as dividend recapitalizations, has reached $54 billion this year, according to Standard & Poor’s Capital IQ LCD data, topping the record $40.5 billion in all of 2010.
“It’s one of those things they do and it helps their returns,” Steven Kaplan, a finance professor at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, said in a telephone interview in reference to private-equity firms. “It hurts their companies and it’s money their creditors will not get."
Read the whole article here
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