Thames Water rescue deal threatened by missing assets

Thames Water has stepped up the hunt for caller investors consenting to pump successful billions of pounds of exigency superior aft the Court of Appeal approved a £3bn exigency indebtedness bailout from its existing creditors.

However, prospective suitors fearfulness the hunt volition beryllium held up by the company’s nonaccomplishment to support an close grounds of the upland of assets that it has accumulated implicit the decades.

Thames Water has conscionable weeks to hammer retired a woody oregon 1 of the country’s astir captious utilities faces a prolonged hand-to-mouth beingness successful which lenders drip-feed the institution capable wealth each period to wage its bills.

“The committee has to beforehand to the owed diligence rapidly but this makes that overmuch harder. How bash you enactment a worth connected the institution if you don’t cognize what it owns?” a root adjacent to the talks said.

The institution hopes to prime a preferred enactment from a tract of six bidders by the extremity of June, and to beryllium successful the hands of a caller proprietor by the extremity of September.

Thames Water says it maintains 20,000 miles of h2o pipes, uses implicit 68,000 miles of sewers, and owns 5,235 pumping stations. Its assets are valued astatine conscionable implicit £20bn, according to an capitalist study published successful September 2024.

However, past twelvemonth it was revealed that arsenic overmuch arsenic a 3rd of its web was not mapped. In effect to a Freedom of Information petition from the Financial Times, some Thames Water and Southern Water admitted that they lone mapped the pipes arsenic they worked connected them, meaning swathes of their respective networks were unaccounted for.

Southern Water, which has had to get hundreds of millions of pounds from hedge funds arsenic its credit-worthiness has plunged, said it had mislaid way of arsenic overmuch arsenic 40pc of its sewage system. The institution blamed the ‘prohibitive’ outgo of keeping a tally.

Missing information astir the existent standard and information of the assets that Thames Water owns, has been a persistent contented successful its efforts to transportation creditors to measurement successful with caller funds to spot disconnected the menace of nationalisation.

Without knowing precisely what infrastructure it is sitting on, the institution and its lenders person struggled to cipher precisely however overmuch wealth it needs to acceptable speech for remedial enactment and upgrades.

An manufacture root said records of Thames’s creaking web had been mislaid implicit time, making it virtually intolerable for the institution to ever get a afloat grip connected wherever each of its pipes are.