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Britain's ports poised to fall into foreign hands

US bank close to sealing agreed bid for AB Ports
Sale to consortium will cause political row

Terry Macalister
Monday June 12, 2006
The Guardian

The vast majority of British ports - including Southampton, Immingham and Port Talbot - are poised to fall into foreign hands with an agreed bid from a consortium led by Goldman Sachs, the American bankers, close to completion.
The £2.4bn deal could be announced as early as this week as Goldman Sachs has completed due diligence on the 21 docks owned and operated by Associated British Ports.

The move is bound to trigger further political soul-searching about the UK's vital infrastructure being controlled from abroad, particularly after last week's agreement to sell the airports group BAA to the Spanish and P&O's takeover by Dubai Ports World (DPW). Goldman had tried to acquire BAA but lost out to Spain's Ferrovial. Neither Goldman Sachs nor AB Ports was willing to comment last night on the state of the talks but industry sources confirmed that a deal was close to being signed.

Goldman Sachs, alongside Borealis Infrastructure Management of Canada and GIC Special Investments of Singapore, won permission from its board two weeks ago to go through the books of AB Ports. This followed discussions around a potential offer priced at £2.4bn - 810p a share - which was up from £2.2bn during an initial rejected approach for Britain's biggest docks company.
AB Ports handles a quarter of the UK's seaborne trade through its 21 facilities, which includes the country's largest docks at Immingham to one of its smallest, Silloth on the Solway Firth. The company employs 3,000 staff and is a descendant of the state-owned British Transport Docks Board, which was privatised by the government of Margaret Thatcher in the early 1980s.

The UK port sector has been through its biggest period of upheaval for 20 years in recent months with a series of smaller companies changing hands. The most significant was the surrender by P&O to the £3.9bn bid from DPW after a bidding war that included Singapore's PSA International. P&O's main value came from the container handling terminals in the US and China rather than its small holdings in Britain. The main one was a P&O-leased facility at Southampton, a dock owned and run by AB Ports.

Last year Mersey Docks and Harbour Board agreed a £771m takeover by Peel Ports while the Teesside operator PD Ports was bought by the Australian-listed infrastructure company Babcock & Brown. The ports - and airports - sector is seen as attractive by private equity investors because they offer a stable stream of income, possess large property assets and have a good growth outlook.

Soaring global trade volumes - partly resulting from the industrialisation of China - have brought increased volumes to ports everywhere, including British ones such as Immingham.

An independent study by the consultancy MDS Transmodal for the Department for Transport predicted a doubling of container import volumes by 2030 and the government is deciding on whether to give the go-ahead to a number of applications to build more terminals.

The London-based private equity team at Goldman Sachs has been working flat out on due diligence at AB Ports after losing out on BAA. But well-informed sources said there were a few minor issues to be ironed out. "The fact that you have heard nothing from Goldman over the two weeks of due diligence tells you something but I would not be too strict on any timing," another source said.

The London-based bankers would dearly love to land a sizable deal after being criticised by Hank Paulson, the outgoing chairman and chief executive of the Goldman group, for their aggressive takeover tactics. The private equity team has launched unsolicited bids for a series of companies including ITV, Mitchells & Butlers, and London & Continental Railways. Its patchy track record also included backing Philip Green's failed bid for Marks & Spencer as well as BAA.

A takeover would rattle backbenchers inside the Labour government but would probably gain the support of the government. The transport minister, Stephen Ladyman, said last month that American opposition to a Dubai company taking over US port facilities through acquisition of P&O was a "very bad mistake".

Backstory

Associated British Ports owns 21 docks. They range from the very big, such as Immingham, which handles vast quantities of everything from coal to cars, to the very small such as Silloth in Cumbria, which handles grain, fertiliser and cement. In Scotland, AB Ports owns and operates Ayr and Troon. It also controls docks as far apart as Ipswich, Southampton and Port Talbot. The company rose out of the ashes of the state-owned British Transport Docks Board, which oversaw the vast bulk of docks before privatisation in the early 1980s. The ports were often a centre of militancy, and the dismantling in 1989 of the National Dock Labour Scheme, which gave the trade unions considerable control over staffing levels and its members "jobs for life", led to a bitter strike. Since deregulation, there have been few industrial disputes but jobs have been cut.

http://business.guardian.co.uk/story/0%2C%2C1795269%2C00.html

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Bush Administration Quietly Plans NAFTA Super Highway

By Jerome R. Corsi
Human Events
6-14-6

Quietly but systematically, the Bush Administration is advancing the plan to build a huge NAFTA Super Highway, four football-fields-wide, through the heart of the U.S. along Interstate 35, from the Mexican border at Laredo, Tex., to the Canadian border north of Duluth, Minn.


Red Dawn - FOR REAL
www.nascocorridor.com

Once complete, the new road will allow containers from the Far East to enter the United States through the Mexican port of Lazaro Cardenas, bypassing the Longshoreman's Union in the process. The Mexican trucks, without the involvement of the Teamsters Union, will drive on what will be the nation's most modern highway straight into the heart of America. The Mexican trucks will cross border in FAST lanes, checked only electronically by the new "SENTRI" system. The first customs stop will be a Mexican customs office in Kansas City, their new Smart Port complex, a facility being built for Mexico at a cost of $3 million to the U.S. taxpayers in Kansas City.

As incredible as this plan may seem to some readers, the first Trans-Texas Corridor segment of the NAFTA Super Highway is ready to begin construction next year. Various U.S. government agencies, dozens of state agencies, and scores of private NGOs (non-governmental organizations) have been working behind the scenes to create the NAFTA Super Highway, despite the lack of comment on the plan by President Bush. The American public is largely asleep to this key piece of the coming "North American Union" that government planners in the new trilateral region of United States, Canada and Mexico are about to drive into reality.

Just examine the following websites to get a feel for the magnitude of NAFTA Super Highway planning that has been going on without any new congressional legislation directly authorizing the construction of the planned international corridor through the center of the country.

* NASCO, the North America SuperCorridor Coalition Inc., is a "non-profit organization dedicated to developing the world's first international, integrated and secure, multi-modal transportation system along the International Mid-Continent Trade and Transportation Corridor to improve both the trade competitiveness and quality of life in North America." Where does that sentence say anything about the USA? Still, NASCO has received $2.5 million in earmarks from the U.S. Department of Transportation to plan the NAFTA Super Highway as a 10-lane limited-access road (five lanes in each direction) plus passenger and freight rail lines running alongside pipelines laid for oil and natural gas. One glance at the map of the NAFTA Super Highway on the front page of the NASCO website will make clear that the design is to connect Mexico, Canada, and the U.S. into one transportation system.


* Kansas City SmartPort Inc. is an "investor based organization supported by the public and private sector" to create the key hub on the NAFTA Super Highway. At the Kansas City SmartPort, the containers from the Far East can be transferred to trucks going east and west, dramatically reducing the ground transportation time dropping the containers off in Los Angeles or Long Beach involves for most of the country. A brochure on the SmartPort website describes the plan in glowing terms: "For those who live in Kansas City, the idea of receiving containers nonstop from the Far East by way of Mexico may sound unlikely, but later this month that seemingly far-fetched notion will become a reality."

* The U.S. government has housed within the Department of Commerce (DOC) an "SPP office" that is dedicated to organizing the many working groups laboring within the executive branches of the U.S., Mexico and Canada to create the regulatory reality for the Security and Prosperity Partnership. The SPP agreement was signed by Bush, President Vicente Fox, and then-Prime Minister Paul Martin in Waco, Tex., on March 23, 2005. According to the DOC website, a U.S.-Mexico Joint Working Committee on Transportation Planning has finalized a plan such that "(m)ethods for detecting bottlenecks on the U.S.-Mexico border will be developed and low cost/high impact projects identified in bottleneck studies will be constructed or implemented." The report notes that new SENTRI travel lanes on the Mexican border will be constructed this year. The border at Laredo should be reduced to an electronic speed bump for the Mexican trucks containing goods from the Far East to enter the U.S. on their way to the Kansas City SmartPort.

* The Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) is overseeing the Trans-Texas Corridor (TTC) as the first leg of the NAFTA Super Highway. A 4,000-page environmental impact statement has already been completed and public hearings are scheduled for five weeks, beginning next month, in July 2006. The billions involved will be provided by a foreign company, Cintra Concessions de Infraestructuras de Transporte, S.A. of Spain. As a consequence, the TTC will be privately operated, leased to the Cintra consortium to be operated as a toll-road.

The details of the NAFTA Super Highway are hidden in plan view. Still, Bush has not given speeches to bring the NAFTA Super Highway plans to the full attention of the American public. Missing in the move toward creating a North American Union is the robust public debate that preceded the decision to form the European Union. All this may be for calculated political reasons on the part of the Bush Administration.

A good reason Bush does not want to secure the border with Mexico may be that the administration is trying to create express lanes for Mexican trucks to bring containers with cheap Far East goods into the heart of the U.S., all without the involvement of any U.S. union workers on the docks or in the trucks.

http://rense.com/general72/mex.htm

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Abbie Bernstein:

Do you believe a government can be shamed into or out of what it's doing by the actions of individuals?

Joss Whedon:

The idea was to say that people can make a difference, they can show the wrongs that are being done. They can speak out against them and make people aware of them. They can even create giant scandals. Sometimes they can topple governments. The point is that the truth is always more important than the power structure, and whether you make a dent or not, the fact that you succeeded in trying is a victory.

-Serenity - The Official Visual Companion

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Citizen wrote:

Boring.

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"We don't need no stinkin borders."
-President Whorehay Bush Jr

The Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America: Next Steps
The three leaders of North America agreed to advance the agenda of the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America (SPP) by focusing on five high priority initiatives:
www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2006/03/20060331-1.html

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Originally posted by piratenews:
So Mr C, you do support selling out your nation? What a disgrace to the British Ministry of Defense. What a bloody wanker you are.

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Originally posted by Ruxton:
Pirate,
I hate to say it, butthead, but you're right being alarmed about this. No one seems to care, and not only on this board, but throughout the U.S.

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