What did Sarah Bentley, the now ex-chief executive of Thames Water, mean when she warned repeatedly in her final months in the job that England’s largest water and wastewater company had been “hollowed out over decades”?
A benign(ish) interpretation is that she was merely reprising what everybody has known for years: that Thames was rinsed by its former owners, most notably the Australian financial outfit Macquarie, which was the dominant shareholder from 2006 to 2017. That was the period in which the company’s borrowings were increased towards today’s towering level of £14bn and the regulator Ofwat was reduced, more or less, to appealing for Macquarie to get out and make way for more far-sighted owners.
