West End letters: Icelandic money | UCLH | PFI financing

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West End Extra - LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
Published: 7 November 2008

Some of our Icelandic money is back here!

• In your story about PFI financing at UCLH (Hospital ‘vulnerable’ over the ability to borrow new money, October 31) you write that a £422 million hospital built by the Health Management UCLH building consortium will be paid for by the trust at £64 million per year for 40 years.
I make that £2.56 billion. Multiply this by all public projects nationwide and you get a chilling premonition of the looming calamity which is PFI.
Pretending this debt is... er... not a debt by keeping it “off the books” won’t help: Enron tried this and look what happened to them. And whether this Alice-in-Wonderland accounting tactic “appeals” to UCLH bosses or not is irrelevant, the off-the-books requirement was imposed upon them by central government; by Gordon Brown to be precise when he was chancellor.
Further into your story, however, there is a glimmer of light for anyone who might be idly wondering what actually happened to the money invested so shrewdly for us by Westminster City Council and others into the disintegrating Icelandic banking system.
Tying in nicely with your story about the collapse of the NoHo Square project it turns out that the consortium bankrolling this project included Icelandic bank Kaupthing and that they bought the old Middlesex Hospital site from UCLH boss Sir Robert Naylor for £175 million just before the property market (and then bank and then the project) collapsed.
So some of our Icelandic money is already back in the country, safe and sound with Sir Robert!
He will be able to build a new cancer centre with this cash without having to resort to PFI and if the official receiver is looking to off-load the old Middlesex Hospital site Sir Robert may well be able to buy it back for a song and put the cancer centre there. Perhaps he has already thought of this which is why he looks so quietly pleased with himself in your photograph.
Martin Kennedy
Brewer Street, W1

Send your letters to: The Letters Editor, West End Extra, 40 Camden Road, London, NW1 9DR or email to letters@westendextra.co.uk. The deadline for letters is midday Wednesday. The editor regrets that anonymous letters cannot be published, although names and addresses can be withheld.
Please include a full name, postal address and telephone number.
Letters may be edited for reasons of space.

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