Call yourself barbarians at the gate? Actually, KKR hates the decades-old description, but the US private equity firm is still meant to have a fearsome reputation for doing its homework, being a cute judge of political risks and going where others fear to tread. All of which makes its 11th-hour abandonment of its £4bn bid for Thames Water very odd.
The suggestion is that the big bosses in New York couldn’t stomach the political and reputational risks of owning the UK’s largest and most crisis-ridden water company. If that’s the reasoning, though, KKR should explain itself. The political risks aren’t obviously worse than six months ago – and arguably are less now that the government’s water commissioner, Sir Jon Cunliffe, is talking aloud about “how to restore the stability and predictability of the regulatory system” in his interim report published co-incidentally on Tuesday. Thames’s reputation is still in the gutter, but that’s not fresh news.
