The crazy world of asset strippers

There's more than one way to skin a cat, it's said, and we don't doubt it. Especially if the cat in question is of the working-class variety, because we're being skinned alive in a myriad different ways.

But they all amount to the same thing in the end - they are ways to shift money into the pockets of the rich and away from the hands of working people.

Keep your eyes open, because today you can be skinned until you're skint and you won't notice it until your P45 lands on the table.

Even then they'll probably tell you that it's for your own good as an English/Scots/Welsh man or woman because it's for the good of the economy. And as we all know, what's good for the economy's good for each of us.

So let's have a look at one of the less savoury ways of skinning you alive - the leveraged buy-out.

It's one of those phrases that's now in everyday use. Sounds impressive, doesn't it?

Perhaps it's impressive in presentation, but, in substance, it ain't.

As you will know if you work - or more likely, used to work - at a firm that's gone through one.

What's the recipe, then?

In essence it's quite simple. The buyer-outer - or rip-off artist as he's known in our circles - buys a company, restructures it to make it more efficient, leaner and hungrier, and then sells it on at a profit.

Or that's what they'd have you think. The truth's a bit more complex. In fact, it's a lot more complex.

First, you need a target company that qualifies.

Qualification isn't arduous. It ought to be a publicly quoted company that's underperforming.

It doesn't need to be loss-making. In fact it's better if it isn't.

Just not making as much profit as it might, so that some of its shareholders aren't all that happy and could be persuaded to part with their shares.

You don't have to have all of them, a mere 51 per cent will do nicely. Or even less if a majority of the others will co-operate with you.

And preferably the firm ought to be asset-rich, with lots of branch offices, shops, subsidiary firms or what have you.

So far, it sounds harmless enough. Might even be good for the workers, you might think.

You'd be wrong, though, because that's only the first part, the one the Tories present as the acceptable face of finance capital.

It gets trickier as the story develops.

Because you don't want to use your own money, do you? Oh, no indeed. So you borrow it instead. It's called leveraging and it's an integral part of the process. Why, we will come to later.

And this is where the posh boys' closed shop comes in.

If you don't believe me, go into your local bank branch and tell them you want to borrow a mere 20 million quid and see where it gets you.

But if you head up a private equity company - a company which is given millions to use by rich dumbbells who can't work out what to do with their millions but are so greedy they want them to go forth and multiply, you're laughing.

Then, when you go to the bank with hundreds of millions "under management," you get a very different answer.

But the super-rich won't give over their millions to just anybody.

You have to have a track record of successful profiteering, so the mafia of "management consultants" maintains its grip.

Serve an apprenticeship with any of the top firms, which are usually from the US, and you come out smelling of money and can eventually kick off your own fund.

But back to our leveraged buy-out.

You borrow your millions and buy the shares. You're up to your pretty little neck in debt repayments, of course, but that doesn't worry you if you've chosen your target fund carefully.

Because it isn't your debt. You now own the company so you load the debt you've incurred to buy it on the company itself.

Now you've got a heavily indebted company where before there was a moderately successful one trundling along, because it's paying for its own takeover.

Not good, so the next step is to reduce the debt to manageable proportions by disposing of the firm's outlying assets and, in the jargon, "stripping it down to the core business."

In the process, of course, you have to make all the workers in the outlying concerns redundant, as well as as many in the core business as you can get away with.

Wage costs go down and you make a tidy surplus for a few years on the back of the disposals.

If you've chosen carefully, your target firm also has stock of its product that can be run down, disguising any productivity downturn while you are screwing the remaining workers to keep production levels as high as possible - blackmailing them with keeping their jobs as the prize.

The firm is now lean, mean and looks effective. It will continue to do so until its debt - the one you created to buy the business - overwhelms it, along with the problems of meeting its contracts with a reduced staff.

You might even get away with taking some of that surplus generated by selling the assets and "realising shareholder value" by paying it to yourselves as dividends.

And then, before its problems catch up with it, you sell it off. You walk away with the value and the company is stuck with the debt.

And if you had the sense to set up the holding company somewhere like the Cayman Islands you're laughing all the way to the offshore bank.

Not to name names, but think of a troubled and now defunct care homes chain, or a huge retail concern that got passed from hand to hand until with much relief from the union concerned, it was bought by a traditional retail concern, and you will see what we mean.

So that's leveraged buyouts. They don't all have all the negative points, it's mix and match.

But all of them have some. There are few that working people sit back and feel thankful for.

Soon we will look at just who these buyout whiz-kids are.

But until then, just keep watching - and write in if you find that we're wrong and they are absolute patrons of industry.

We don't expect many letters.