Monthly Archives: June 2016

Builders shares crash as Britain votes to leave the EU

It would appear that the house builders’ share price rise since the financial crash of 2008, has been built on the same dodgy foundations as some of their houses are. A business model built on selling sub-standard houses to sub-prime borrowers.

This was illustrated during the first two days of trading following the UK’s historic vote leave the EU. Worst hit in the initial market panic were Banks and shares in the listed house builders. Despite this, some ever-greedy directors used the Friday crash to buy more shares on the cheap, known as “catching a falling knife” and promptly lost another 15%! Taylor Wimpey Non-Exec director Dame Kate Barker, 59, who produced the Barker Review on housing supply in 2004 – which resulted in the industry setting up the HBF Customer Satisfaction Survey two years later, but has failed to have any impact on improving either supply or quality – bought 20,000 Taylor Wimpey shares for £26,953 but the shares closed down 15% leaving her with a paper loss of £3,800.

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Persimmon CEO Jeff Fairburn £93m bonus windfall

“The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those that have too little.” …Franklin D Roosevelt

I was disgusted when I first reported on Persimmon Long Term Incentive Plan (LTIP) in April 2013  – I still am.

This week, Persimmon’s LTIP bonuses have come into further criticism and were the subject of universal widespread condemnation. Apart from their PR company spokesperson, no one can possibly agree that bonuses on this scale can be justified, even if there has been exceptional performance. Investment giant, Royal London Asset Management said Persimmon was being insensitive when many were suffering from their failure of house builders to construct enough homes, Mike Fox went further saying the payments were “too high in all circumstances”.   The LTIP payments have been critically publicised this week in The Guardian, Daily Mail, Telegraph, Independent and on the BBC website.

Beleaguered Persimmon buyers across the country must have recoiled in disgust when they learned of the scale of the projected payments that 150 Persimmon executives will trouser over the next five years if, as seems likely, the twice extended, Help to Buy gravy train keeps on running all the way to house builders’ bank accounts until 2021.

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