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For Sale

Roy Mayall

Something that hasn’t been mentioned much in the post-privatisation analysis is the amount of money the Royal Mail stands to make out of its immense property holdings. One building alone in the company’s portfolio of disused offices in London – the mail centre in Nine Elms Lane – has been valued at half a billion pounds. That’s one-sixth of what the government sold the whole company for.

The office was closed in 2012, more than a year before the sell-off. And it’s not the only one. Hundreds of delivery offices up and down the country, including mine, were closed in the run up to privatisation. Several of them remain unsold.

Could the offices have been kept empty on purpose? Royal Mail bosses now stand to make a lot of money out of the company they once used merely to manage.


Comments


  • 19 December 2013 at 5:59am
    farthington says:
    Ah yes, the post-Soviet model.
    The predatory Oligarchs, who Western readers have been taught to despise.
    And here we have the home-grown versions, no doubt to be feted as managerial geniuses.
    There is not and has never been any such thing as a 'free market'.