Centrica/British Gas/Shell (4)

Centrica has announced huge 6-monthly profits today (27/07/22), with them making £1.34bn to the month of June compared to £262m for the same period last year. This follows the news that Shell announced a £9bn profit for the last quarter.

Inevitably Centrica bosses have defending the huge rise in the face of possibly one of the worst cost-of-living crisis for at least 50 years.

Quote:-
But Centrica chief executive Chris O’Shea defended the decision and insisted a lot of the firm’s profits were “going back into society”.

“I know it’s difficult to see the word profits, or dividends, or similar words when people are having a tough time. I’m very conscious of this,” he said.

“Bear in mind, over the next couple of years we are expecting to pay a windfall tax of probably well over £600m on our UK gas business off the back of the profits that we’re seeing, so a lot of this is going back into society.”

Well that’s alright then!. And I suppose if you’re a small shareholder the extra dividend might just be enough to pay for the expected 74% price cap rise for electric and gas at the next review in October, courtesy of toothless OFGEM – a company who has now decided to review the price cap quarterly rather than twice a year effective, from October.

Private businesses have every right to make a profit, otherwise what would be the point. But where does one draw the line during troubled times such as this and companies such as Centrica/Shell “exploiting” the situation with profits that could be seen as excessive!

Is it morally right for CEOs and other boardroom members to be rewarded with excessive pay rises/bonuses while millions of householders face a budget squeeze?

Whatever the rights and wrongs news announcements such as this won’t go down very well with a lot of people.

BBC News Link

Nominated by: Technocunt

Update: BP has also announced massive profits. in the last quarter they made just under £7bn – their biggest quarterly profit in 14 years.

BBC News Link 2

73 thoughts on “Centrica/British Gas/Shell (4)

    • As long as they are board members of these profiteering cunts, I will have no problem with it

      • I’d be delighted to do a ROLE form for those cunts, but it’ll be fucking pensioners, as usual.

    • Things are going to get nasty.

      Spokesman for OFGEM mr D.Magoo said

      “Seems reasonable.”

  1. Id like to give both Liz Truss &Rishi suntan a word of advice

    Be careful what you wish for.

    Being PM might of been your childhood dream,
    But when half the country cant afford to heat their homes,
    Pay the bills,
    Theyll be quite rightly looking for someone to blame.
    Your it .

    When a civil unrest led by Foxy and his organisation have started to kick down the door at number 10,
    Revising green levies is a little to late….

    • Just done the weekly shop..fuck me. And still they will chuck billions in foreign aid at ungrateful Third World shitholes. Viva Che Fox!

      • That is what really, really pisses me off. Even though half the fucking 3rd world are appearing on the south coast, all expecting free money and houses. And fucking getting them.

      • Che Fox is back! Posted on the MSM thread on 6th August, three days after his ‘departure’😁 No doubt Dick Fiddler’ll be sharpening his metaphoric pencil!

    • Politicians made this mess so hopefully they will be held accountable.

      The “just in time” cheapskate energy infrastructure is and always was a ticking time bomb.

      Add the eco hippy “green” policies that are an anvil round the neck of the country..

      Hey Presto! A totally avoidable fucking nightmare looms..

      • You make me laugh Unkle T, “Hopefully Politicians will b held Responsible” Well there are two hope’s. Bob Hope and No Hope.
        All politicians, doesn’t matter what Party or what Country, are fucking cunts who only think of themselves.
        The cunts are going to blame Putin’s war on the Ukraine.
        The west is shit scared of the cunt. And the USA and NATO could stop the war. But the elite make money out of war, so it’s fuck off you unwashed cunts.
        What’s a few million dying this winter. It’s the Annual Cull

  2. You have to wonder whose side OFGEM is on – as if we didn’t know. In a year of unprecedented price rises across the board, they have decided to go in for quarterly reviews, rather than twice yearly – and the first of these “extras” will be in January – the very month this rotten country usually gets very cold indeed. the government should ahve given a very firm no to that one this year. As ever Labour just sit on the fence, wanking over pictures of Lisa Nandy with her tits out (or the fruity gentleman over pictures of Mandy)

    The spouse is going to have to cut down on her confectonery bill, and I will have to do the unthinkable wear pullovers in the house, which I haven’t done since I was 8 and my parents forced me into them. All right for the politicians – Starmer and Sunak have centrally heated trusses and I daresay old Thornberry is too fucking fat to feel the cold.

      • You really wonder what’s the point of Offgem, Offwat and many of the other regulators. I imagine the CEO of these organisations wandering into the office at about 9.30 to be greeted by his secretary with a cup of coffee and a couple of biscuits followed by a nosh. Then it’s elevenses and an important lunch meeting with the MD of one of the big water or electricity companies at The Gavroche or Ledbury or maybe the Savoy Grill, from where it is merely a short taxi ride to the local rub and tug shop. Back to the office for a cup of tea and a biscuit and then home to the Mrs in th 1st class carriage on the 5 o’clock from Waterloo. At the end of the month a £50,000 pay cheque awaits.

      • They are ineffective quangos which get paid for overlooking people’s work making theirselve a mint whilst putting the good guys in Prison. They have no power they allow monopolies to work. They are the monopoly.

    • Ofgem exists purely to protect the markets profits. Any pretence towards public service is a bare faced lie.

  3. I`m collecting wood now for the winter; if I don`t, I`ll run out of soot by the new year. And I can no longer afford to buyGinger(anag)® Brown boot polish.

    • Mrs Twatt doesn’t know this yet, but come winter she’s getting flung on the fire.

  4. If only there was a political party that (historically) tried to support working class people against rapacious capitalists and hadn’t been culturally appropriated by the smug middle classes and turned into a pressure group for the gender confused, led by a gormless, multimillionaire barrister.

    Oh. Fuck.

    Vote SDP…
    https://sdp.org.uk/

      • If Conservatives and Labour are indeed “two cheeks of the same rancid arse” then the SDP are the spotty, fetid, fly blown anus in the middle…

    • Yet again I learn something on ISAC. I was under the impression that the SDP had gone down the pan years ago.

  5. I’ve always been a believer in free markets.

    But for fuck sake. These people have bare face lied about wholesale prices due to the ‘Ukraine’ situation as a justification for putting energy up 75%. I would buy it if they barely made any profit but they’ve made a joint record profit which is simple proof its total bullshit.

    The government had 6 months to revise the ofgem cap and havent acted.

    To make everyone think they have, Instead they give everyone £400 – paid for by a windfall tax that has encouraged
    Firms to raise prices further.

    They havent moved to cap petrol and diesel so it can be put up by 20p a day at a whim.

    As a PR exercise they proposed a ‘5p’ tax cut that retailers arent obliged to pass on and wont. And wow. If they do i can pay 1.90 a litre, not 1.95.

    All i can deduce from it all is that the government wants inflation. After all, if they take double the VAT and duty on everything then it devalues the money they borrowed and wasted to deal with that bit of flu we had.

    As a side note, despite our ‘crippling’ economic measures, the rouble is at a 5 year high against the pound. Its as if the BBC think you are that stupid you cant check a fucking exchange rate. In fact, most people dont and genuinely think that the Russians have been sent back to the stone age and gladly sit here taking all of this like cunts in the name of ‘doing their bit for Ukraine’.

  6. From what I can gather, the Price Cap is now more geared to protect suppliers from going bust than protecting their customers from being ripped off (which was OFGEM’s original purpose back in 2019).

    Over the last 15 months or so we’ve seen 20 odd energy suppliers go to the wall, which has meant OFGEM moving their customers to what is called SOLR (Supplier of Last Resort) – which is usually one of the big players such as British Gas and Octopus.

    The debt from those suppliers that went bust has been reallocated in part to the Standing Charge of the millions of customers with suppliers who were not affected. In other words a bail out. Which explains one reason why the SC is so high.

    The quarterly review of the PC is to give suppliers a better chance of not folding due to wholesale prices rising faster than they were allowed to buy under the 6 monthly price cap collar. This should see fewer companies going bust. But what it also means is that the price cap will rise more regularly over the next few months, which is bad news for customers on standard variables.

    https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/6337769/energy-price-cap-your-questions-answered#latest

    • Exactly that, all those good time cunts who were playing monopoly with the energy market were caught out when the prices suddenly shot up. Only the suppliers with ‘something behind them’ could survive and pick up the pieces.

    • Why single out standard variable tariffs? Anybody on ANY tariff is going to be paying through the nose to cover the price of directors’ Aston Martins. Nothing has changed except many more people than usual will die this winter. Sadly, they won’t be MP’s.

      • It’s worth pointing that, even if you can afford to run the central heating, it won’t work in a power cut.

      • Quite so.

        It’s not far off the point, dependant on whether the Net Zero bollox continues to be pushed on us, that it will be more cost effective to go off grid with a diesel generator, batteries and an inverter. If we start suffering regular power outages I may make the decision early.

        I only have modest power consumption but it’s the standard charge that is crippling. None of that with my own generator (as long as it’s reliable and I think they mostly are). The most cost will be paying an electrician to install it all (it might be worth seeing if I can do it myself and get an electrician to certify the work).

      • The idea was to encourage competition in the market, the standard tariff is the default tariff, before the current situation you could shop around to get a better deal, it worked ok until the shit hit the fan… I doubt there will be any deal to found anywhere now.
        If you were lucky enough to get a 2 or 3 year fixed with one of the big boys before the prices went skyward you will be laughing all the way to the bank.

      • Agreed, everyone will be affected sooner or later. But the only saving grace for those on a new fix is that they have their prices locked for between 12 and 24 months even though their SC and UP is usually higher than the current SVR.

        Whereas those on SVR looking for a fix will have to withstand regular price fluctuations based on whatever the next Price Cap increase (or decrease) may be.

        At the moment SVRs are relatively cheap compared to current Fixes primarily because SVRs are capped from the last increase in April, and therefore do not reflect the latest wholesale price rises. But that will change come October.

        No doubt these same companies will announce even bigger profits for the next 2 or 3 quarters with the advent of winter.

        You can just imagine the CEOs rubbing their hands with glee at the hope of a long and very cold winter!

      • Mikdys putting your house on a diesel generator so that you can switch between that and the mains supply is absolutely piss easy. Anyone who asks more than a token sum to do the job is a scammer.

  7. I rarely have the heating on anyway.
    It has to drop below minus .

    Ive two log burners in the garden,
    Theyre coming indoors.

    Ill burn the fuckin bills for fuel.

    And ive always enjoyed camping so its going to be jolly sat in military sleeping bags cooking on the embers,
    In the dark .
    Dont think the kids have ever eaten by candlelight?

    Lesson in romance for them😁

    • Long johns and thermal underwear will be highly prized from washing lines this winter Miserable. Unless you are one of those fussy pilferers who don’t like wearing other peoples undercrackers.

      • Oh no LL , im not the fussy type .
        And if it doesnt fit?
        I repurpose.

        A elderley ladies knickers substitute for a balaclava,
        No, i’ll be warm enough in my wedding dress, tracky bottoms and 2 jumpers.

      • Can I wear Jennifer Lawrence’s undercrackers on my head please instead of a Woolley hat??

  8. These astronomical price rises would be understandable if the energy companies were making a loss or breaking even, but by all accounts they’re making record profits. This is a national emergency and where is the government? Nowhere to be seen. Johnson is on holiday, just like he’s been ever since becoming PM. A fish rots from the head down. Sunak, Truss, Zahawi and the rest of the cabinet do nothing but stink from arsehole to breakfast time.

    • Boris really was a totally useless cunt, I have hopes but he turned out to be a total and utter wankstain.

      • That was the worst lie – pretending to be a conservative to get elected. At least Corbyn was honest about being a cunt who would spend £billions and tax is to the hilt.

    • Utility bills could be 2 grand a month and those hopeless cunts would still be sat round a table talking complete fucking rubbish.

      Goes for any emergency….politicians are useless for anything but world class corruption.

      • And yet they seem so righteously shocked when anyone expresses any distrust of authority…

  9. Ofgem are just doing what they have been set, to ensure prices aren’t increased so people get ripped off, ooops, only works when the market is stable.

    The prices are set and we have to live with them but it can be mitigated by government action.
    The Green Levy for a start, shouldn’t even be there anyway, maybe VAT off domestic gas and electricity. The price cap which is the default tariff can be reduced by government action, they have already put in £400 for everyone and extra for the bone idle and pensioners.

    I am not a fan of spaffing money on the fucking lazy cunts but if the government stopped the 10 billion going to shitholes and used it to help the ‘least well off’ (Brits only) I could vote for that.

    There has to be a line in the sand for government interventions and benefits, we are either a society based on free markets or we are communist and the state controls everything.

      • Made by Hattori Hanzo guaranteed to stay sharp for up to 500 dinghies, just need to Frogs to get stabbing 😂

    • I’d prefer a few passes by an A-10 Warthog. Followed by an Apache to do a bit of mopping up.

      • Good afternoon DCI. In the eighties used to see the A10s training over the East Midlands. Once watched at least a dozen of them fly around the old masts at Rugby at maybe 100′ like a swarm of angry bees. Were the chain guns really 30mm calibre? That would have made a mess of their dinghies!

  10. Climate and Ukraine together on the same protest banner? And yet they’re not wearing masks?
    Fuck off…

  11. What is even more annoying is some of the spiv bosses of those energy companies that went bust (Bulb and Avro, spring to mind) were still earning large salaries even after their companies went into administration.

    Moreover, it would seem none of them have been investigated while the government (Taxpayer) bailed them out running into the billions. (hence the higher standing charges)

    Spiv bosses for spiv companies can seemingly walk away unscathed and still earn a good wedge while their customers find themselves with more expensive SOLRs.

    I suppose that’s the risk you take when opting for cheap energy from these new-kids-on-the-block companies

    • The spiv former chancellor managed to just walk away from the mess he created over the last two and a half years,no different really.That cunt isn’t even trying to keep a low profile.
      To paraphrase that bird from 80’s TV show “FAME”…
      ” Covid hysteria costs….and right here is where you start paying”,or something like that. Biggest tax grab in all history.

  12. Price of gas is following oil and is on a decline. I suspect ofgem are allowing the suppliers to build up a “war chest”. It’s you and I paying for it – as ever. Do you think the price of utilities worries the dingy divers?

  13. Best thing to do is give up your British citizenship, catch a ferry to France, give some dodgy geezer a “monkey” for a trip back to Dover by Dinghy Express.

    Put on a dodgy foreign accent and say you’re from some war-torn shithole that doesn’t actually exist.

    4 days later you’ll be bigging it up in some 4* hotel in Brighton, all expenses paid (including electric/gas/water/food/broadband/rent/council tax).

    Sorted!

  14. Windfall taxes are a waste of resources as the cash will simply be soaked up by the civil service like blotting paper.

    Joe public will see fuck all return – I guarantee.

  15. Don’t rely on any of these cunts to pay your bills for you get a tent and forage. These fucking wankers are playing a game who breaks first, use you nugget. This is fucking extortion.

  16. The SNP are keeping very quiet about “Scotland’s Oil”. They haven’t mentioned it for years.

    If that was being produced in sufficient quantities to save Britain they might justifiably get a second independence referendum – but no! We’re all in the same fucking boat.

    I think there is a conspiracy here Centrica/British Gas/Shell and others have decided:
    1. Destroy all the small sale “suppliers” (billing companies),
    2. Shaft the customer for as long and as hard as possible.

    We need a hard as nails PM to tax them to fuck with 98% Corporation Tax and refund customers pro-rata for the next 3 years. That’ll learn them.

    Zombie companies like Bulb are also screwing their customers despite their claims of 100% renewable electricity.

  17. If you can’t beat them, which is looking unlikely, er, trade on them? I should probably learn sharpish how to day trade energy prices and the share prices of Shell and BP.

    • Day trading, really Mrs C? From what I’ve heard unless you have inside information you would be better advised to put your money on the horses.

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