Who is pouring crap all over Britain? The Environment Agency is the main regulator dealing with companies which pollute our countryside, and it has been busy recently trying to dissuade firms from pumping filth over the landscape. 

It is doing their best but its powers are limited. There is a big question mark over the agency’s ability to stop the polluters. 

Because it is dealing with the most don’t-care, not-bothered-by-fines, anti-social people in the world — bankers.

In September Thames Water was fined £250,000 for polluting the Chase Brook in Newbury. The offence happened back in 2012 but justice pursues polluters quite slowly. 

The firm allowed “untreated sewage” to flow into the brook, which runs through a nature reserve. 

The sewage spilled out of an emergency overflow pipe from a Thames Sewage pumping stage. 

Thames had ignored an alarm about the blockage which caused the overflow for five days. 

Thames Water’s spill of sludge fed “high levels of both ammonia and E coli” into the brook. 

The Judge Mrs Recorder Arbuthnot said Thames was guilty of negligence. 

The Environment Agency prosecutor Rooma Horeesorun said the fine was so big because the judge “took into account the financial circumstances of the defendant” — Thames Water’s “profit for the year ending March 31 2014 was £346.7 million,” she said, so “the message is clear and the level of fines ordered reflects proportionately with the financial circumstances of the defendant.” 

It’s a good principle. Big profitable companies should pay big fines. 

But even a quarter of a million quid is a pinprick to a firm like Thames Water. Its huge profits are squeezed out of water customers who have no choice. 

The Environment Agency pursues water companies over pollution, but regulator Ofwat looks after its place in the market. And Ofwat is quite clear there is no free market in water. 

It admits that “under the current legislation, household customers are not able to change their water supplier or sewerage service provider.” 

So the Environment Agency is trying to get its pollution fines in proportion with company profits. 

But Ofwat will just let the water firms squeeze more profits out of their captive customers, amply making up for any fines. 

Who could possibly be behind this aggressive company, which spurts filth into lakes, while squeezing money out of customers? 

An Australian bank called Macquarie. Down under, Macquarie is seen as a scandal-hit bunch of sleazeballs. The bank has been attacked for dodging tax and cheating customers. 

In the latest scandal, Australian financial regulators have told Macquarie to write to 160,000 customers and advise them they may be due compensation. 

Macquarie had been offering what Australians call “shonky” financial advice — we might call it “dodgy.” 

Investors had been sold risky investments they did not need. Macquarie’s “advisers” were acting like a bunch of con-men. 

They had passed their financial exams after being given a file with all the answers to the questions in it. 

The bank called this the “Penske File,” after an episode of US comedy Seinfeld, in which one character — the self-loathing George — works for a whole week in a job which he does not understand. 

George bluffs his way through work on a file of the same name. Macquarie thought its staff should aspire to be like George from Seinfeld. 

Australians know Macquarie and its “shonky” behaviour, but in this country the press rarely talks about it, even though it owns some of our major assets. 

Macquarie employs former Labour minister Lord Gus Macdonald as its main man in Britain, presumably to make Brits think they are nice people. But they are not. 

Macquarie is just one of many bad banks, which it shows in the way it runs Thames Water as well as its behaviour in the finance markets.

Thames and Macquarie are far from alone. 

This month Southern Water was fined £500,000 by the Environment Agency. 

Last July it pumped untreated sewage into the Swalecliffe Brook, which polluted over a kilometre of the Kent waterway, killing local wildlife. 

Southern Water’s pumping station had been playing up for a week, but despite having good warning of the problem, the firm did nothing. 

It sat on its hands until the sewage was diverted out of an emergency outlet into the brook. 

Environment Agency inspectors went to the river and found “the water was heavily discoloured with dead sticklebacks and eels at regular intervals along the polluted stretch of the watercourse.”

 The eels are an endangered species. Worse, the waterway runs into the sea at Whitstable. The pollution threatened both summer bathers and Whitstable’s oysters. So the Environment Agency pressed for a big fine to be a big punishment on the firm. It’s a good try, but sadly Southern Water are pretty regularly fined, and seems to shrug off the penalties. 

Because, like Thames, it has guaranteed profits from its captive customers. Southern Water made a £139m profit before tax, according to its latest accounts. 

After tax that profit went up to £169m, because it actually claimed a £30m tax credit. It thinks the taxman owes it money. 

Southern Water is owned by a Jersey-based firm called Greensands. This firm is a coagulation of various banking interests represented by JP Morgan and UBS bank. 

Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka Shing also owns a slice of Greensands. So again, the firm spurting shit onto Kent rivers and beaches is ultimately run by a bunch of bankers and a billionaire.

The water companies show everything that was wrong with the privatisation of the Thatcher years. 

Valuable public assets went to dodgy investors. There is no “free market,” as captive customers are forced to hand the firms guaranteed profits. They also show the great failure of the last Labour government. 

They thought accepting Thatcher’s privatisation was “modernisation.” 

But actually it handed power to the offshore bankers, the tax avoiders and the billionaires who make money out of pumping crap into our rivers.