Thursday, November 27, 2008

Loans loans loans

As I'm in Romania I am somewhat insulated from the hurly burly of the present political debate about borrowing all that money ( I ask you, who on earth is going to borrow a falling pound?).
The one thing that did filter through, because it was on Romanian TV news, was that Woolworths had gone bust. That was always going to happen once the original GBP1 takeover failed to work. The Romanians are fascinated by the goings on in UK and US - they find all the esoteric instruments completely incomprehesible. A loan is your brother giving you RON 1000, and getting it back sometime later - with or without interest.
The banks clearly think they can do better than what was on offer. Personally, knowing what administrators and lawyers charge, I would think they will end up worse off, but it may also be a wake up call for other struggling companies - sort yourselves out or you are toast.
That chap Corbett who destroyed Network Rail or whatever it was called was in charge of Woolies for a few years, and appears to have done exactly the same thing ( albeit he left a year or so ago.)
And no, he was nothing to do with Sootie and Sweep.

2 comments:

Whispering Walls said...

Mrs Balls was bemoaning the fact that she won't be able to buy toys from Woolworths. Don't know of anybody else who shopped there. It was an awful lot of rent to pay for selling c***

kinglear said...

ww - they ruined the stores when they were taken upmarket -they were doing fine until they demerged in ( I think) the late 70's/early 80's. Just like today, they loaded up on debt and splurged on refurbishment - without any systems to check stock or anything else.
Then they did it, I think, twice more, AND turned down a reasonable bid a couple of years ago.