Energy firms rip us off as much as the banks did

I don’t do stocks and shares. After I invested heavily in the company I worked for knowing we’d had a bumper year and watched in horror as the share price fell I knew I wasn’t smart (or devious) enough to be a dealer.

So I chose instead to put my savings into trackers that simply follow the general trend of the stock market by investing in a wide cross section of blue chip companies.

As you can imagine, they have not done too well of late so I wasn’t surprised when my statement came today showing an overall growth of just two per cent for the last six months.

It was broken down graphically enabling me to evaluate how each sector performed. Manufacturing was poor at one per cent growth and construction not much better. Chemicals were fractionally healthier and technology showed only three per cent growth.

But steaming off the top of the graph was the runaway train named Oil and Gas at a massive 18 per cent growth in SIX months. In a depressed market struggling to make two per cent that is some exceptional performance but even this was dwarfed by Scottish and Southern Energy which reported a huge 38 per cent increase in profit year on year.

You would have to be some amazingly corporation (like Apple) to buck the trend in such an incredible way.

Scottish and Southern Energy chief exec Ian Derek Merchant appeared on TV urging us not to see this as a phenomenal increase in profit but to compare it with previous years when the company made only three per cent which is like Roy Hodgson asking us not to see England’s performance against Sweden as complete humiliation but to compare it with 1966 when we won the world cup.

Energy companies have a library of justifications they trot out to explain their obscene profits, each one more absurd than the last. Scottish and Southern raised prices to consumers by 9 per cent just before announcing their stupefying increase in profits while energy watchdogs sat like rabbits caught in headlights.

Meanwhile government ministers talk tough but do nothing.

The banks shafted us. Now energy companies do likewise.