"Tony Polson" wrote in message

"Paul Scott" wrote:

Er, doesn't that just make the Lloyds TSB subsidiary another Rosco?
What's the main difference?


It depends how you define a ROSCO. The accepted definition is being
one the three Rolling Stock Companies that were set up in the
mid-1990s to hold former BR rolling stock.

These three ROSCOs - Angel Trains, Eversholt Leasing and Porterbrook-
were privatised in 1996. Angel Trains was later sold to Abbey
National which later became part of the Banco Santander group.
Eversholt Leasing was sold to HSBC and became HSBC Rail. But all
three are still trading.

Other leasing companies have entered the market, but they don't tend
to be called "ROSCOs" because they were not among the original three.
The Lloyds TSB subsidiary will probably resemble a ROSCO in all but
origin - if it isn't one of the original three, it isn't a true ROSCO.

Certainly, the DaFT vendetta is only against those original three
ROSCOs, as it is convinced that they're over-charging for the leases on
the legacy BR stock they inherited. This may be partly because the
original ROSCOs were sold for a song, and the first owners therefore
paid a very low price for all that BR stock, much of which remains in
service. [As an aside, the low prices were largely because of the
Prescott threat in 1995-7 to nationalise the ROSCOs with minimal
compensation, once Labour got into power. Once in became clear that this
wasn't going to happen, the ROSCOs shot up in value and the MBO teams
retired rich.]

Of course, the current ROSCO owners all paid much higher prices when
they bought the second-hand ROSCOs, so one could argue that the
unjustified profit all went to the original ROSCO owners, and that the
current owners paid a fair market price for them. I think there's much
less dispute over the lease prices charged for new-build post-BR stock,
whether by the original ROSCOs or newer entrants to the market, as all
transactions are at market value.