Tuesday 14 July 2009

£4.8 million lost forever


Whilst Mike Freer continues to play this rather tiresome game of burying his head in the sand and hoping that the Icelandic banking scandal will just go away until after the General Election (when it will be someone else’s problem to sort out), Not The Barnet Times has analysed the figures and we estimate that the minimum loss to the taxpayers of Barnet will be a staggering £4.8 million.

Hertfordshire County Council, which deposited £9 million with Landsbanki Bank, has had the good grace to admit that some of that money is now lost forever. They expect to receive back just £8.3 million - 87.37% of the original deposit.

Barnet has £15 million deposited with Landsbanki, and applying the Hertfordshire rate, we will have to write off almost £1,895,000.

Then we have added on the lost interest. The report to Cabinet in October 2008 revealed these losses to be £1,037,000 for 2007/08 and £1,513,000 for 2008/09.

Based on these figures, the council is losing around £125,000 a month in interest receipts so we can add on £375,00 for the first three months of 2009/10.

All in all, we conservatively estimate that Barnet taxpayers have so far kissed goodbye to £4,819,736.84 and the figure is rising daily.

Perhaps it would be helpful to express these figures more succinctly:


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