The post you are reporting:
Barry:
On that basis, I think we can agree that your original aspiration that the port might be largely owned mainly by us who live and work here in Dover and East Kent is sadly a complete non-starter, total pie in the sky.
You mention the employees of DHB, the DHB pensioners, the shipping company employees and the remainder of the local population, some of whom may want to invest more and some less than my example. Taken together, they would seem to be encompassed in the 2% figure which I postulated.
The port related companies, such as Hammonds, would be hard put to make much of a dent in the £500 million asking price. Let us say they chip in another 3%.
Would you agree that we are therefore looking optimistically at around 5% of the port being owned by those of us who live and work here in East Kent?
You state that the shipping companies might be interested. The ferry companies, cruise ship companies and cargoship companies which use Dover are, as I am sure you are aware, without exception foreign owned. I was under the impression that you were surmising that the port would remain largely in British hands.
Now we come to the real potential owners. As you rightly say "The remaining shares would be snapped up by pension funds OIEC and Unit Trust managers" (for the benefit of others, I have looked up OIEC and this is defined as "An OEIC Open Ended Investment Company - pronounced oik - is a pooled collective investment vehicle in company form".
This is exactly what has happened to the British ports which have already been privatised. For example, the twentyone ports which used to be nationally owned under the British Transport Docks Board were privatised as Associated British Ports and include Southampton, the Humber ports, South Wales etc, handling a quarter of the country's seaborne trade.
ABP is now owned by the following infrastructure funds: GIC of Singapore (33.3%), Borealis of Canada (33.3%), Goldman Sachs Infrastructure Partners of the USA (23.3%) and Infracapital Partners LP, part of the Prudential Group (10%). ABP is registered in Jersey and pay no corporation tax.
You are no doubt uncomfortably aware of what happened to all the ports and ferries owned by British Rail when they were privatised by the Major government. I shall return to these later but that will do to be getting on with.