Thames Water executives to receive bonuses from £3bn emergency loan
https://www.ft.com/content/1f6d1583-a931-4eb5-be04-b46c32f70db9
Posted by WMalon
Thames Water executives to receive bonuses from £3bn emergency loan
https://www.ft.com/content/1f6d1583-a931-4eb5-be04-b46c32f70db9
Posted by WMalon
41 Comments
**Thames Water executives to receive bonuses from £3bn emergency loan**
*Utility’s chair tells MPs that retention payments are needed to prevent rivals ‘picking off’ staff*
Jim Pickard and Gill Plimmer in London
PublishedMAY 13 2025
UpdatedMAY 13 2025, 18:20
Thames Water’s senior executives will receive lavish “retention incentives” as part of a £3bn emergency loan agreed by the utility that is seeking to stave off renationalisation.
Some executives were in line for “50 per cent of salary; very substantial bonuses” as part of the loan agreed with creditors including the US hedge funds Elliott Management and Silver Point Capital, Thames Water chair Sir Adrian Montague told parliamentarians on Tuesday.
Montague claimed that Thames Water had to keep paying bonuses to prevent rival companies from “picking off” its best employees.
“We have a bonus scheme to protect our most precious resource, which is the senior management team,” Montague told the cross-party environment select committee.
The bonuses would be paid in three tranches in addition to their annual salaries and other awards, the MPs were told.
Montague, a City of London veteran, admitted it was an unusual deal: “This is the first time I’ve encountered this, I’ve done a few restructurings in my time,” he said. “We need this team to stay.”
Chris Weston, a former British Gas executive, was appointed as chief executive of Thames Water in December 2023 and was criticised for taking a £195,000 bonus for his first three months in the job. He is on a total pay package of as much as £2.3mn a year.
The government’s department for the environment, food and rural affairs said after Tuesday’s hearing: “We inherited a water system that rewarded failure, with polluting water bosses paying themselves unfair multi-million-pound bonuses.”
“This government says no more. Under the Water Act, from this year undeserved multi-million-pound bonuses will no longer be paid.”
The select committee hearing comes as Thames Water, the UK’s largest water utility, tries to fend off renationalisation under the government’s special administration scheme. The company, which serves about a quarter of the country’s population, is struggling under the weight of its £20bn debt mountain and is in exclusive discussions with the private equity firm KKR to take over the business.
The £3bn creditor loan — which was challenged in court by rival bondholders — comes with a 9.75 per cent interest rate, plus fees. But Montague argued that the company needed to agree to the deal because Thames Water’s “hair-raising” financial crisis meant the UK’s largest water utility had just five weeks’ cash left at times in the past year.
“Thames in the last year has come very close to running out of money entirely. There were times in the past year when we had five weeks’ liquidity: running a £20bn corporation on five weeks’ liquidity — honestly it’s hair rising,” he told MPs on Tuesday.
Montague defended the agreement to give KKR the exclusive right to a deal, even though Thames Water received five other bids. “The KKR bid was by far and away the best, technically, financially, in terms of the commitment to provide equity, they were ahead,” he said.
He added that he expected much of the board to step down if the £4bn KKR deal is confirmed: “When you have a change in control of a big company like this, you have to expect there will be huge changes in the board, it may be that the new equity owners will want some people to stay but the expectation is that the majority will step down.”
Tim Farron, the Liberal Democrats’ spokesman for the environment, food and rural affairs, said: “It is outrageous that whilst Thames Water are accumulating seemingly exponential debt, they are choosing to give themselves enormous bonuses. In the meantime, they are passing the buck to customers who are being slapped with eye-watering bills.”
““We have a bonus scheme to protect our most precious resource, which is the senior management team,”
Says everything about their priorities.
Personally, I would like to see not only the water systems renationalised, but for the bosses that paid themselves lavishly on the back of their own failure? I would like to see all of their ill-gotten personal assets retrieved.
Can someone square the circle of the management team being their most precious resource while they’re accepting emergency loans due to gross mismanagement of the company?
“It’s best employees”.
Employees that have managed to bring the whole fucking system to it’s knees.
Be interesting to see what bad management looks like if these are the best ones.
The greed fest continues.
Because **of course** they are.
Executives couldn’t possibly suffer when the companies they run are circling the drain, for the usual excuse of “we’d just lose the talent if we don’t pay it”.
Whether they actually *are* talent is the real question here.
If the bonuses are paid to stop the best from leaving, christ knows what the worst workers are like.
Why hasn’t there been emergency legislation put in place to prevent this blatant financial abuse of households?
Hang on a second… If the company is in such dire straights to be needing an emergency government loan to avoid going bust despite being a regional monopoly, why the hell would any other senior management hiring process not be treating them as more toxic than the stuff in their sewer pipes right now?
Look over there, a small boat! That should keep them distracted while we rob them blind, and when they ask “where has all the money and public services/utilities gone?” we can blame minorities again.
We have been socially conditioned to blame all the problems created by the rich and powerful on those with no money or power.
I’m not saying they should go to prison but I would like to see them in a prison.
At this point, they are just laughing in everyone’s face.
My taxes are going to pay for the failures of these fat cats.
We are sleepwalking into giving No10 to Nigel fucking Farage.
I give up with this country, this government and Keir Starmer.
This is insane, how has this company passed any form of audit? They’ve admitted to failing an acid test ratio right off the bat, they’re obtaining high interest loans for their lack of liquidity whilst buried in debt and completely without saleable assets… I’m not often for nationalisation but this is a circumstance where the company needs to be immediately taken over by the Civil Service and all senior executives put on unpaid suspension, possibly investigation into fitness to hold directorships…
Their auditors need to be struck off whichever organisations they belong to…
Reminder they’re paying themselves this bonus while being totally tone deaf on it while also being about to restrict water to ~16 million people because they failed to build any infrastructure for the last 35 years.
Anyone who aided the water companies in this wholesale destruction of our water resources should, and I mean this unironically, be in prison. It’s a national disgrace.
They do exactly the same with the trains private companies run it into the ground go bust government takes it back invests in new trains and upgrades then hands it back to private company to repeat the cycle
Imagine being paid a fucking bonus for doing a shit job. It’s like tipping a waitress who’s just pissed on your chips
We are being mugged off as a country! So I am guessing once they privatised the nhs it will be more of the same. Tell me one system that has been privatised and got better?
Have these executives bankrupted the company yet or they still need more time?
It’s a national scandal the water firms are not being held to account yet. Toothless regulators and successive governments content with letting us get robbed. Hoped labour would do something but it seems they are happy to have the piss taken out of them.
Emergency loan to pay bonuses for senior management who are doing a shit enough job that an emergency loan is required
These fuckers really are despicable
If I saved my company from bankruptcy buy convincing the government to give us a blank cheque with no strings attached or oversight and made my investors billions I’d feel like I had earned a cheeky couple of mil too.
We shouldnt be rewarding complete failure. TW was a car crash set up during margaret thatcher reign. Sacking the majority of the workforce and reducing spend on infrastructure to make more profit. Fines for discharging into the rivers are paid by the customer. Surely this should be the shareholders or the management?
If you stopped mauntaining your car and when it failed its safety checks, just paid the fines for driving with no mot, what do you think would happen?
Why in gods name do the government continue to let this absolute joke privatisation experiment go on. Nationalise it, the debt is bad anyway. Best to deal with it.
These people don’t give a shit about the customers they serve. The only reason they exist is because they have a monopoly and guaranteed customer base.
Fuck off.
They will continue to take the piss out of us to our faces because we will continue to take it and.maybe, at worst, grumble a bit.
I understand that sometimes this becomes a tory vs labour vs reform discussion. Could we try to see beyond that? Water is the most precious resource we have and the UK is blessed with enough of it to be in an advantageous place. These nefarious actions need to be stopped (similar examples with trains) as they are delipidating the country’s wealth and us the people…
Only the government can do that and take action. Reading these news and normalising them isn’t acceptable.
I struggle as an individual to understand what I can do… Clearly voting is not doing the trick.
I keep saying it and will keep saying it. Any infrastructure we need to stay alive and give basic means of comfort should be state owned and ran. Water, power and public transport should not be here for fat cat bastards and share holders to get rich off the people of this country. The lot needs bringing back under our control.
And this is why LABOUR are pushing through the water (special measures) Bill
It’s not known however what reform make of the idea to give regulators more power to reign in water execs since they as usual were not in parliament to give an input…
https://bills.parliament.uk/bills/3751
What I think is necessary is a total renationalisation at no cost to the government or taxpayer. Just seize it. They’ve earned their money already let’s take it back. Those with extreme power like the monarchy should step back into play and use it for once
To enjoy the benefits privatisation would bring us….
The French would be rioting in the street. The bare faced corruption is disgusting.
Sigh. everything in this country feels like a race to the bottom. The fact an essential human right aka access to water is treated this way is… god we’re pathetic.
A non-exhaustive list of words and phrases these clowns need to learn the meanings of:
– “indefensible”
– “tone deaf”
– “out of touch”
– “read the room”
– “entitled”
– “no-one is irreplaceable”
These guys should be falling on there swords, instead they are helping themselves to a cut of the rescue package thats preventing them from sacked.
Lock this lot up ffs. The running of that company is borderline criminal
Does it stop being fraud just because it’s not done secretly?
Want to know why voter turnout is low or folk are voting for anti-establishment shite? It’s this
I’ve got no doubt that reform will ever actually do anything for workers. But If your on a pish wage, watching starmer dole out millions to his pals your gonna obviously just vote for anyone who says that the systems rotten and a vote for them is a vote against it.
(Cause sadly the fact farage is bankrolled by Americans and the oil and gas sector isn’t in the zeitgeist, but this is).
Genuinely if any of these folks saw a day behind bars, even just a day. You’d see starmers approval jump overnight.
How see sue them? They raise the price of our monthly bill, get a judge to give them 3billion more of our money and yet they are still getting a pat on the back because of some supposed pat on the back. Na this is a joke
They’ve proved that they can’t be trusted running a utility. Time to take it back into public ownership with no compensation
“…The company, which serves about a quarter of the country’s population, is struggling under the weight of its £20bn debt mountain…”
So, literal shit being poured into our waterways, huge water losses through leaky infrastructure, prices going up, service getting worse AND 20 billion GBP worth of debt. Yep, sounds like the management team have been doing a bang-up job. Give them more bonuses!