22 May 2023
‘A great sucking sound’: Eversholt as a case study in the parasitism of the rolling stock companies Introduction In October 2012, Andrew Haldane, then an Executive Director at the Bank of England, described the way that the banking sector drew people into its activities and extracted wealth from the nation as ‘a great sucking sound’. This striking metaphor could be used aptly to describe the relationship between the companies that lease trains and the railway industry. While passengers face reduced services and staff endure pay cuts and attacks on their jobs, one thing has remained absolutely unchanged during the pandemic: the ongoing looting of the railways by the rolling stock companies (ROSCOs). In this briefing we examine one of the three rolling stock companies, Eversholt, and look at how they are sweating the UK rail industry’s asset base for eye-watering quantities of money with the protection of the government and almost no public scrutiny. •
Eversholt’s latest accounts show that last year it paid a dividend of £40,700,000 to its Luxembourg-based parent company.
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In the last ten years, has paid £380 million in dividends to its Luxembourgbased parent, with an average annual dividend payment of £35 million.
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These dividends represent, on average, between around 70% of the profits being made by the group of companies.
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In the last ten years, Eversholt has also paid £520 million in interest payments on inter-company loans from its parent company.
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Since 2017, this has been in the form of a Eurobond – a form of loan - of £340 million from its Luxembourg-based parent company. Under the terms of this loan Eversholt pays a coupon of £14.06% or £47,891,000 every year.