Here in Financial Regulation Matters we have focused on the Private Finance Initiative (PFI) marketplace on a number of occasions, and we have looked at the conduct of the leading auditors on many occasions too; in today’s post, the focus will be on the relationship between the two, which will provide with an overview of recent turbulent events within the marketplace and the potential, albeit a very slight one, of the contagion within the industry causing either a massive organisation to fail, or more probably their regulator to collapse. We looked at the concept of the PFI late last year and discussed how the injection of private interest into the public sphere is perhaps the most obvious of examples of how one can, purposefully or otherwise, examine the theory and neglect the reality. Whilst we looked at how the ideology was creeping (although that word perhaps downplays the actual situation) into publically vital sectors like the NHS – Virgin’s recent consolidation in this...

Today’s post acts as a sequel to a previous post here in Financial Regulation Matters that was concerned with ‘Public Finance Initiatives’, or PFIs for short. In that first post, the PFIs were established as a good idea captured by private greed, ultimately posing a great threat to society at a time where greed can have generational consequences over and above that caused by the Financial Crisis. The focus of the post was on the cross-party support for these initiatives, with their output being vastly overvalued and the tab being taken on the by the citizens of the U.K. However, in this post, we will look at the PFI issue from within the confines of tax, or more precisely the lack of it, that is derived from these initiatives. However, there is something important that needs to be declared before the post continues, and that is that this post does not aim to fall in line with a certain political party’s denouncement of all things private i.e. the current incarnation of the Labour ...