Last week [Qinetiq] flogged over half its shares. Its chairman, who paid £129,000 for his stake in the company, is now worth £27 million, and its chief executive £22m... it is hard to see what they did to deserve it. As Lord Drayson’s Labour predecessor, Lord Gilbert, pointed out, “All the value was built up by public servants using public money. I consider it a complete outrage . . . a scandal.” In a letter to the Telegraph on Saturday, the former managing director of the Defence Research Agency – the government body that was split up and turned into Qinetiq – described the profits as “greed of the highest order”: the two men, he said, had captured the benefits of decades of work by the company’s scientists and engineers
So next time we're tempted to salute the free enterprise system let's remember such things and recall that the market always has to have regulation to make sure that Adam Smith's invisible hand really does work for the common good and not simply for private greed and general exploitation.
George Monbiot � A Good Model for a Mugging:
Filed in: Monbiot, capitalism, greed, shares, Qinetiq, privatisation
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