Member Info for The.Crowman

@Edgeguy - The current price is double the lows last year so imagine how you would feel if you had sold then?

I was hoping for better and indeed the start looked promising, I have added 50k this morning and expect to see 55p fairly soon. My sell point is your BE so hopefully you will get your cash back and me a tidy profit.

Funny old game S&S's some you win and some you lose...... ask me about RR - held over a 100k and sold the lot for couple of grand profit. Would now be worth nore than my entire portfolio. Hey ho.

Anyone betting against C26 is likely to look stupid quite quickly. As sad as it is true the serial doomster on all matters AML has been proven to be correct for as long as I can remember.

AML are in deep trouble but on that score whats new. Shareholders are the biggest losers here and thats not going to change - D4E is a racing certainty but when?

Take a squint at Mr Dim Jim Oxford on the Wood Group BB.

Serial ramper and possibly the most deluded poster in the history of LSE, has turned his attention to CPI once more in a manner for akin to an Albatross than a positve.

May God have mercy on us.

Indeed.

Could not happen to a more deserving pair.

Shameless and Cabbage?

Those dim witted pompous twerps have the hide of a rhino but I strongly beleive even these dullards cannot embarrass themselves further on here.

Well thats the hope.

Cya - Would'nt want to be ya'

Ingenuity was the jewel in THG's crown and the reason MM got the shareprice away at £5. That THG holders got zero back on demerger unless they reduced their THG holding ie a net lose also was a utter con job. Throw in MM grabbing the juicer fixed assets at the same time and its easy to see why LTH are fuming.

That said and dealing with the here and now the shares are undervalued - the fear factor holding them back is more MM finacial chicanery but on balance I do not see him getting that opportunity again. Holders above £2 here need to accept their loss - I am a seller at a quid which is more than I thought possible 6 months ago.

For any investors wanting to understand the mindset of a losing gambler and I would suggest how to avoid becoming one take a leaf through the esteemed Acker's posting history.

Not sure even Gamblers Anonymous could help.

Sympathies.

Our water supplier - Anglian has taken its customer service to SA. It is beyond useless and truly worthu of contempt. If this is Capita then god help us.

If you could see where we are now? Truth be told this has been an epic waste of peoples time and I doubt even with a Yes vote (likely IMV) this will go past 25p.

No credibility with Sidara to actually complete - almost as if they are slowly and effectively driving WG into a very dark corner - like lambs to the abattoir.

Got love the calibre of UK management today. Utterley incompetent - can all be down to one bull sh*tting Indian CFO whose CV was a pack of lies? I doubt it this kind of screw up runs deep.

@Stew - the one certainty in all of this is you will post some ramping nonsense like anyone considers your opinion to be worth a carrot.

You are as tragic as you are inadvertantly funny.

In 2010 Raymarine went bust and the BOD told anyone that cared the shares were worthless. the shares touched 2p having sunk from recent highs of over £5.

To keeps their jobs they sold out to Flir and accepted 20p a share in the face of a better offer from Garmin of 35p.

Scandalous manipulation of the sp just to keep their positions. Expect the same here.

Take the 30p - if anything better comes along then its gravy.

I read it as a cry for help, help to rationalise why they went long on AML when short was and remains the only investment case.

We have all made bad calls so sympathies to anyone long here for more than they can afford to lose. Truth is AML are in a very deep hole that keeps getting deeper. It is pretty much screwed and increasingly the world is recognising this small fact.

At least we have not had Lozzer Stroll peddling any more lies recently - the situation is past spin and bullsh*t from him.

Missed milestones

Since launching in 1684, the Civil Service Pension Scheme has become Britain’s third largest of its kind. Its 1.7m members have built up £189bn in pension promises in the form of guaranteed, inflation-linked payments for life.

The Cabinet Office is accountable for the scheme, but the process of paying pensions, managing contributions and dealing with members’ queries is outsourced.

Since winning the new contract, however, Capita has been widely criticised for issues that have emerged during the two-year transition.

A scathing National Audit Office report released in June found that three key milestones had been missed, which led to the Cabinet Office withholding £9.6m in contractual payments.

The report also revealed that Capita would operate a simplified IT solution to avoid further delays, reducing the available service for both scheme members and employers until at least March next year.

In July, Cat Little, the Cabinet Office’s permanent secretary, confirmed that eight milestones had become due, but Capita had met just one. She added that it had “probably underestimated” the complexity of the transition.

This was followed by a damning new report last week from the Public Accounts Committee (PAC), which scrutinises financial accounts and value for money. It concluded there was “a clear risk that Capita will not be ready to take over administration of the scheme as planned.”

The PAC also found that the Civil Service Pension Scheme’s customer service levels had been unacceptable since at least 2023 due to MyCSP’s low staff numbers, but that Capita was planning to employ even fewer people when it took over.

Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown MP, the committee’s chairman, said: “It is deeply frustrating for this committee to be scrutinising an issue that ought to be as seamlessly run as civil service pensions.

“Scheme members who have dedicated their careers to public service ought to be secure in the knowledge that it is under sound administration.”

Concerns had already been raised over Capita’s track record, including its handling of the Teachers’ Pension Scheme.

It spent 27 years running the multi-billion pound scheme, beginning in 1996 and netting more than £170m from contract renewals. During its tenure however, a Schoolsweek investigation revealed that administrative failures could have left some teachers’ pensions tens of thousands of pounds lower than they should have been.

Lengthy delays in issuing pension valuations also left thousands of teachers unable to finalise their divorces.

In June 2023, the Department for Education declined Capita’s bid to renew the contract and instead handed a new 10-year, £234m deal to Indian IT company Tata. Capita also lost a £107m contract for managing SATs tests last year.

Recommended

This article was released mid morning yesterday - you lot are a bit slow on the uptake, one wonders whether someone has an agenda at the Telegraph?

Either way it has done little for the sp.

For non subscribers:

The £239m gamble threatening to leave 700,000 retirements in limbo

Public sector workers left in limbo as ‘failed’ contractor ‘bites off more than it can chew’

Rob White

Money Writer Rob White

Related Topics

State Pension, Private pensions, Civil service, Capita

02 November 2025 10:00am GMT

463

Public Sector Pensions

More than 700,000 retired civil servants could have their pension payments interrupted by a failing £239m government contract, a trade union has warned.

Consultancy firm Capita was planning to assume control of the Civil Service pension scheme in December after sealing a 10-year deal, despite being stripped of the same contract just over a decade ago.

However, the Cabinet Office has now confirmed that the takeover date remains in limbo with less than five weeks to go.

The Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS) said that critical issues had emerged during the transfer, which could delay the payment of pensions and redundancy settlements, while MPs concluded there was a “clear risk” that Capita was not ready to take on the £8bn-a-year scheme.

It comes after the firm was handed a £14m fine earlier this month following a data breach and two years after it was axed from the contract to run the Teachers’ Pension Scheme.

Capita ran the Civil Service Pension Scheme until 2012, when it was replaced by the current administrators MyCSP. It won the contract back in November 2023 and penned a new deal worth £239m over 10 years, which requires sending around £8bn a year to 730,000 retirees and handling £7bn in incoming pension contributions from Dec 1.

Recommended

Pay workers the state pension three years early, Labour urged

Read more

At the end of a two-year transition period between the firms, however, the Cabinet Office confirmed this week that the final decision over whether to approve the transfer had still not been made.

Fran Heathcote, PCS’s general secretary, previously told The Telegraph that “shocking failures” under MyCSP had put the scheme at risk of collapse and called for it to be brought in-house.

Responding to the latest developments, she said: “It’s clear there are major potential issues with the transfer.

“These could well result in delays to current pension payments, delays to pensions payments due to begin, further delays in actioning the McCloud pensions remedy judgment, delays in calculating redundancy and exit payments, delays in responding to scheme members’ queries, and problems for members trying to access the IT portal.

“We resolutely believe that the only safe option for a pension scheme covering 1.7 million scheme members is to bring the physical administration of the work back in-house, under direct min

They're probably all 'woking' from home...

I chat to one walking the dog - out here in Norfolk. Often as not at 3.00pm so he has a sharp finish some days. A fire finance boss lives a few doors along and he WFH three days a week and looks to all intents as having retired.

WFH has decimated the standards of customer service in the UK. I despair at how bad it has become - I suspect the FCA is much the same.

That assumes Aston are genuinely worth when bust anything like 1.6bln. Ford thought it was worth about a billion but in the end got 600m IIRC.

Entirely conceivable this will be bad news all round including bond holders. As for unsecured creditors and shareholders they are toast.

https://ssoreport.com/aston-martin-q3-2025

hard to see where aml go from here my advice would be cut capex to the bone, reduce the price of the cars, reskin dbx to make it more individual and less like a fugly ford kuga and build it at ***don and finally stop the f1 sponsorship - its clearly adding nothing to sales. but even with some dramatic changes i do not see aml surviving in its current form. it cannot be long before suppliers will insist on up front payment and deposit holders start taking their orders off the table due to real concern aml are going bust.

those chumps currently owed their £1.6bln must surely be mentally writing it off.

Paul - No offence but your love of AML is delusional. The ship is sinking and increasingly quickly. CG's obsession with this small fact is annoying but he has called this correct. It is not if but when AML goes bust and your denials are not going to stop that fact.

However I suspect you will almost enjoy going down with your beloved AML so hold on tight to the railings - It will not be long to wait..............

While Aston Martin continues to promise jam tomorrow and an uptick in the current quarter, it conceded that volumes for the full year would decline “by mid-to-high single digit percentage [points]” from the 6,030 recorded in 2024.

At the operating line, or earnings before interest and tax, it said the numbers would come in “below the lower end of the range of market consensus” previously pegged at losses of about £110 million. That is one third worse than the outturn for 2024 of operating losses of £82 million.

In an attempt to right the ship, the company is cutting capital expenditure to £350 million for the year against an initial forecast of £400 million and Hallmark has ordered further cuts in operating expenses to save £38 million on 2024 levels.

The company’s long-awaited addressing of the need to begin inserting batteries in some of its fleet to meet future regulatory zero-emission clampdowns appears to be still stuck in the garage. It said a “review of the future product cycle plan is under way” and capital investment in engineering and development is to be cut by £300 million over five years to £1.7 billion.

The great hope that the company has been peddling for some time, that it will be about cashflow breakeven for the year, has been set aside. “The group no longer expects to meet its prior guidance of positive free cashflow generation in the second half of 2025,” it stated.

Astom Martin’s shares, which floated at £19 apiece in 2018, edged down a ¼p, or 1.2 per cent, to 64½p by the close of trading yesterday.

Aston Martin losses surge as Trump tariffs bite

www.thetimes.com

Aston Martin Lagonda has reported yet another quarter of poor performance, with falling sales volumes leading to a larger than expected reverse in revenues, another big loss and a rise in company debt.

Not for the first time, London’s only listed carmaker warned that it would miss previously guided volume, earnings and cashflow targets for the year.

It put out a warning earlier this month of fragile consumer demand and further delays in production of the high-margin £850,000 Valhalla supercar.

For the three months to the end of September, the company reported a 13 per cent fall in volumes to 1,430, leaving the number of cars it has delivered in the first nine months of the year at 3,352, a year-on-year drop of 8 per cent.

Revenues were down by 27 per cent in the quarter to £285 million with average asking prices for its cars, after a period of sustained inflation, stalled at £177,000 per vehicle. That has left year-to-date income 26 per cent adrift at £739 million.

At the bottom line, gross profit margins on sales have dipped below 30 per cent compared with 37 per cent a year ago and the cost of servicing its debt is on the rise again. The quarterly loss was £111 million, nearly ten times the deficit in the same three months last year when the company was promising that it had turned a corner.

For the first nine months of the year it was £252 million in the red, worse than the prior year’s figure for the same period of £228 million.

Net debt, a longstanding millstone, is costing the company £55 million a quarter to service.

Despite repeated attempts to mend the situation through debt restructurings and new issuance, and equity injections from new and existing shareholders, net debt has risen again to £1.38 billion. The company admitted that it has burnt through £415 million in cash in the year so far.

Adrian Hallmark, the former Bentley Motors boss who last year became the latest Aston Martin chief executive to be appointed by the chairman and leading shareholder Lawrence Stroll, admitted the company’s road to recovery had been blighted.

“This year has been marked by significant macroeconomic headwinds, particularly the sustained impact of US tariffs and weak demand in China,” he said.

The company’s outlook statement has turned towards the downbeat. “The global macroeconomic environment facing the wider automotive industry remains challenging,” it said.

“This includes uncertainties over the economic impact from US tariffs and the implementation of the quota mechanism [for exports from the UK], changes to China’s ultra-luxury car taxes and the increased potential for supply chain pressures, particularly following the recent cyberincident at a major UK automotive manufacturer [the Range Rover group JLR].”