Prime Minister,
https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/ive-paid-premiums-28-years-162013282.html
So Ocaso, the Spanish insurance company with a UK division (https://www.ocaso.co.uk/) are wriggling like worms on a hook to get out of paying at least one insurance claim arising from flood damage.
I suppose we should be used, by now, to insurance scams. After all, the DWP has run one for years on behalf of successive governments and is now also using all means – fair and foul – to refuse to pay out to people who have paid premiums in the form of taxes for years.
Isn’t it strange, though, that the private sector uses the monies that it takes in to invest in such projects as the ruination of characterful town centres, turning them into sterile money-making machines with rent levels that would ransom the average monarch, but government has decided to throw off the mantle of ownership of national infrastructure and is, instead, selling it off to those same private sector concerns?
Does it not occur to anyone in government that, if the insurers are taking over the role of infrastructure ownership, there must be money to be made from it? With this in mind, does it not also follow on logically that if it remained, or even once again became involved in, such ownership projects, government could earn itself sufficient revenue to bring down the amount of taxes being paid by ordinary people. VAT for example?
Ocaso won’t pay out because they know damn well that the UK government will pick up the tab for those who are left high and dry once the flood waters have receded. Yet again, we are seeing the UK being stuffed by an overseas corporation, and our increasingly irrelevant politicians not having the courage to stand up and tell them that either they honour their commitments or lose their licence to trade in the UK. Yet again the taxpayers are going to have to fork out for the weakness of our ineffectual leaders, this time to the tune of over £1bn. The only long-term result of this can be that people will cease entirely to trust insurance companies and it will fall to the government more and more in the years ahead to cover the costs of damage such as we’ve seen recently. With a still-reduced taxpayer base, that’s now been revealed to be even smaller than was thought, since the DWP’s figures regarding unemployment levels have yet again proven to be outright lies, it will be interesting to see how the sums are going to stack up, isn’t it.
Oh, and by the way, openly lying to the Guardian’s reporter about your government’s flood defence spending really wasn’t a good idea, you know.
There’s a crime on the statute books, Prime Minister. It is called “taking money under false pretences” and is otherwise known as “deception.” Ocaso have accepted premiums from the woman in the report for twenty-eight years, meaning that they must have accepted the risk on her property. That is a contract, and their breach of it is not only a civil, but a criminal, offence. If they chose not to physically examine the location that they were insuring in all that time, that is their problem, not their customer’s.
Perhaps it is time that your or one of your cronies stood up and advised Ocaso to flog off one of their shopping malls in Spain, so they can honour their contracts in the United Kingdom, which supplied the means for them to invest in the first place.
Note the distinct sound of continuous breathing here.
Sincerely,
Darren Lynch
