Soaking the citizens

Dieter Helm has just published "A new regulatory model for water". Part of his conclusion is that:

[U.K] Water regulators have presided over a large-scale exercise in financial engineering, transferring value from customers...to investors...The original privatisation ‘contract’—that the balance sheets should be used to finance real capital investment — has been broken. Now the regulators, and the customers, face highly geared companies with limited balance sheet capacity...

P.S. 4 June: still making out like bandits.