Bjørn

Well said, Roubini.

I can see two easy ways to put a stop to this corruption. First: require all MPs to declare every detail of every expenses claim to the Register of Member's Interests, available online. Second: require any incumbent MP to publish a full listing of all expenses claims as an appendix to their next election manifesto. The only reason the bastards thought they could get away with it was because they believed that we'd never find out.

********! That wee thing is less than 15 acres. That's little more than 3 hectares. The asking price of £86,206 per acre is nuts. You won't be allowed to erect any permanent structures on it and you wouldn't even be allowed to grow a decent crop of potatoes either. Thre only use for the place would be to stake the likes of Gorm Broon, Ali D, Shreddie Goodwin, Tom McPillock et al to some rockbolts and let the seagulls peck their eyes out.

ReMaxers are sexually self-sufficient.

So, what is the ReMax plan for May 4? Put their prices up? Those tossers really haven't got a clue how markets work.

I concur with Dances that the Pymy Parliament should have been accommodated in the old GPO building. Plenty of space and an ultra-central location. The top of Calton Hill would have been best, with a classical building being built behind the already existing facade, but the GPO would have been vastly cheaper to convert than a newbuild on Calton ever could have been. Hillbilly, yes that entire building ws all part of the GPO. It was set up in the days when Royal Mail was a rail-based system. It goes a dozen or so floors down to the rail depot and then has some more basement floors beneath that. It served much of Scotland for trunk routings. It was built in a much missed era when governments regarded public services as a national treasure, not a source of quick-buck easy revenue. Attila the Hen detested railways and when she came to power in 1979 that building was instantly doomed.

Brilliant place! Excellent use of STR funds, in my opinion.

Yup, thems' the ones. I drove past there a coupla days ago and noticed that CB/DJ, or more likely the Administrators, have given the job to Savills. Puts Rettie's nose out of joint somewhat! Their (Heritors') posh office just round the corner is still empty and unadvertised.

These ones were prolly fully financed by OPM in the first place, I'd guess. One of 'em was bought by Charlie Bee in the first flush of his post-Honkers exuberance when he supposedly had a "warchest" of £50M of OPM from suckers in Honkers and the hind-tit of Malaya. The other, next door, seems to have been bought at the vinegar-stroke of loony bubbledom on a similar basis. Strange that CB/DJ can make money while those two unsold and unoccupied properties, which are prolly worth 'bout a mill between the pair, moulder in a declining market which, according to Zoopla at least, seems to be declining at a rate of somewhere from -9.7% per year to -7.0% per half-year to -4.6% per quarter. One suspects that the sucker "investors" in the BTL scheme are paying very dearly for that Aston Martin. I, for one, will not weep for them.

In Autumn last year I observed that DJ's strategy appeared to be to put DJ/Heritors properties onto the sale market when tenants turned over. Then there was the insolvency thing and the Administrators took over. Properties which were owned by one of the shell "companies" in the British Virgin Islands, which appear to be beyond reach for the Administrator, were taken off the market. I took a look at a couple of the "New Town" ones a few days ago and they're both lying fallow. No For Sale or To Let sign, but no current tenant either. He (and his buddy, CB) appear to be playing games with the Administrator. Why else would they leave two properties, each of which is worth half a million, lying furnished but unoccupied and unadvertised?

Don Juan

Yup, he's right. It's not oil as you might think of it though. He was talking about Gas To Liquids (GTL). Qatar has unbelievably vast amounts of gas, but gas is tricky to transport intercontinentally. What GTL does is to process the gas molecules directly into finished products such as diesel, petrol, jet fuel, heating oil etc. GTL not only adds value to the raw feedstock but also makes it much more transportable. The products are also "cleaner" burning, ie less of the nasties such as sulphur. Ironically the oil industry has come full circle. The world's first oil refinery was set up near Bathgate by James "Paraffin" Young to process a highly bitumenous form of coal into lamp oil and other oil products. Spindletop and all the "gusher" thing came a decade or three later. During WW2 the Germans were heavily dependent on the production of oil products such as petrol and diesel from coal. A fact that Shell's official history has airbrushed out of existence is that its leader, Henri Deterding was an ardent Nazi supporter (so was Dubya's Granpappy Prescott Bush, but that's another story) and co-operated extensively with the develoment of that technology. Today if you gominto the main entrance hall of Shell House in London you can see an empty alcove in the wall. That was for a bust of Henri deterding which has been discreetly removed and disposed of. Today Shell GTL is a world leader in GTL technology and their Qatar project is the prime centre of excellence in that technology.

I too remember reading that crap in 1970. World going to run out of oil and fresh water within 30 years. Alvin Toffler made millions out of that crap. Since then the price of oil has gone from $3/bbl to over $140 and I don't doubt that in 40 years from now it will have gone up by a similar multiple again.

How much is the deposit on the trolley to wheel the house out of the shop and across the carpark?

It's a pity that ******** hasn't been removed from the filter, 'cos Boris is certainly talking ********. Clearly he doesn't know anything at all about bees. He totally confuses honeybees with bumblebees, which are different as orangutans and cheese-eating surrendermonkeys. The bee with the pollen sacs was a she, not a he. Like Boris, the males are drones who sit around doing ******all all day, are too stupid to be able to feed themselves, are oversized lunks who consume far more food than workers, and make much more noise than any female could or would.

If it belongs to one of the two DeeJay/CeeBee companies in administration, then presumably it's being flogged off on the orders of the Administrators to contribute towards the debts of those two dud companies. I doubt very much that this one is part of the large batch of DJ/CB properties which were put "beyond reach" (to borrow an IRA phrase) by sticking them behind a wee brass plate "company" in Road Town, Tortola. The wistful wishprice is only slightly comical. The pad was bought about six weeks after Northern Wreck hit a rock, for £1.725m. Assuming it's pitched to sell for 15% under the "Offers Under" price of £1.6m, that a trivial loss of only £0.365m. Presuming that, like so much of the rest of the bag o' shite, it's purchase was largely or mostly made with OPM, that's buttons for DJ&CB.

They're asking the wrong government. They should've asked the parent company's government. That dude with the turban and the tightly coiffed beardybits was here only yesterday.

Those plots of land may well be priced ridiculously, but are they selling at those ridiculous prices? Time to put in an offer on your own terms, priced at a level that you are happy to pay.

Does he mean us? Are we to be bribed with our own money? Again?

Sure he's insane, but he's not the first PM to be so clearly sick in the head. TB Liar was clearly mentally ill at the time of his failed attempt(s) to obtain a UN Security Council authorising the rape and pillage of Iraq. There was period of a week or two when I genuinely expected an announcement that he'd been sectioned and sent off to some remote sanatorium for some serious therapy. I was quite slow to realise how severely mentally ill old Attila the Hen was. It wasn't until that day when she bustled across Downing Street to announce "We are a grandmother" that I realised that she really was barking mad. Brown has completely lost the plot.

We really should prosecute the hypsters and hucksters who are conning the sheeple into believing that now is a good time to buy property. They're crooks and we should be prosecuting them with a view to lengthy, ie multi-decade, prison sentences.

Other than the fur coat an' nae knickers thing, you've comprehensively written the epitaph.

Is John Leslie's slow "'development' as discussed elsewhere I think "perhaps related to his former realtionship with a well-tanned Scandiwegian who was also, notoriously, ?