Thames Water’s problems prompt calls for Macquarie clawbacks

efinancialcareers.com:

Thames Water’s travails this week are shining a harsh light on what has hitherto been a highly lucrative place to work: Macquarie's European infrastructure business. 

Martin Stanley, the former head of Macquarie Asset Management (MAM), is the main man named on the Australian bank's communications concerning its disposal of Thames Water in 2017. Stanley, who ran the Australian bank’s infrastructure investment arm, stepped down in 2021. That year, he was paid AU$19.6m (US$13m, £10m); in 2020 he was paid AU$18.9m. Stanley can presumably afford a comfortable senescence.

While Stanley was the highest profile Macquarie executive associated with Thames Water, historic Companies House filings for holding company Kemble Water, reveal a long list of other Macquarie directors who worked on the investment. They include the likes of Edward Beckley, the former head of Macquarie infrastructure Europe, or Richard Greenleaf, who was also in Macquarie’s infrastructure team. Beckley left the bank in 2016 and is now at TPG in London.

As the British government prepares to step in to rescue Thames Water from its mountainous debt repayments, questions are being raised about how much Macquarie’s various infrastructure professionals were paid during their 11-year tenure as Kemble Water’s owners. More to the point, people are wondering whether there's any conceivable chance of retrieving any of it.

“People who benefitted from it, are responsible for this situation and they need to pay back!!,” says Ludovic Phalippou at Oxford’s Saïd Business School. “Macquarie partners probably got a lot of carry out of this deal. And will pay a reduced tax rate on that.”

Macquarie part-owned Kemble Water, which in turn owned Thames Water, between 2006