The sale of LOBOs to Newham Council is still grabbing the headlines with an article written by the FT today.
At a time when the council is facing savage cuts to its budget, the mounting cost of these highly complex derivative products continue to cause great concern.
This is not just a problem for Newham Council, as across England’s local authorities, they have about 70bn of debt, of that, LOBOs make up a large chunk of this. Newham is in the news spotlight because it was the biggest user of LOBO loans in Britain. It took out 27 such products with a face value of 563mn pounds from the banks rather than borrowing from central Government, the usual source of loans.
Vedanta Hedging has been highlighting the problem since the middle of 2015 when we appeared in front of the Select Committee of MPs in Westminster about Mis-Selling concerns of LOBOs to UK Councils.